‘Magnificence’: a poem by Lisa Gorton

Magnificence

In his study Il Magnifico kept a bronze statue of Marsyas
they called The Nude of Fear. He liked to think about
the mechanics of clocks. He had Verrocchio finish his
antique porphyry statue of Marsyas, its missing limbs made
with such art they had white veins in the red stone
where nerves show in living bodies when they are flayed. 
Among his treasures he kept a mirrored glass sphere,
a unicorn’s horn the length of a lance, an elephant’s tooth. 
When he adopted the child he made out the mother
had been ‘a woman of the Gorini, his friend’. After he died
they found his doctor drowned upside down in a well.