As if he were Palestrina,

when Bocksberger paints,

crowds gather, early as dawn,

blanketing Town Square

and the napping guard won’t

sweep them from the Hall’s

steps where I labor on its doors.

The façade might be

the painter’s canvas, but

no decision in this town

happens without passing

through my bronzed doors, grand

as the gates of New Jerusalem.

Yet, the painter’s acolytes form

a semi-circle by his scaffold

like a choir praising God above.

Their eyes strain upwards

at the crude dyed outline of

David taunting Goliath, and

the bearded man grasping

in one hand a thin palette and

in the other, a pig-hair brush.

Their collective backsides spread

outward and into my doorway.

They’re dumb to the danger:

my belt-pouch still bulging

with unhammered nails,

my hammer swinging centimeters

from their upturned heads.

The painter god they worship

won’t protect them.

Traveler half a millennium hence:

Look for my iron nails, each one

half the length of your palm.

Those slender bits of iron

will have rusted a deep golden red,

yet they hold a bronzed door

ten-fold the size of a man.

Then consider the Hall’s façade,

squint your eyes for as long as you like,

but you won’t see David or Goliath

or even hint of Bocksberger’s

pompous azurite paints

the children prefer to mix for only

a guilder rather than help me for two.

But those tiny nails, wrought from

my heart, will still hold off

a giant set of doors.

Ellen, let us meet in neutral Regensburg

at the Gothic portal of the Old Town Hall

below the armored figures of Protection

& Defiance & outsmart a band of male

blacksmith enthusiasts bound to envy

our accidental discovery: a medieval nail,

rusty cousin to the Cloisters Collection

at the Met; our nail falls from a metal door

at the entry of a stone stairwell, greedy

for the double journey of my linty pocket &

our transcontinental poem exchange,

an iron testament of this woman who forged

the nails of the Crucifixion—though how

male historians discovered an ‘ugly crone’

bent those nails out of iron is anyone’s guess:

the blacksmith’s wife commandeers an apron,

her husband’s, & selects a piece of

wrought iron bar she evens on all sides, forges into a point,

hammers into a hot slug of red metal &

flattens to form a nail head she holds flush

against the edge of the anvil, then hammers

again & again into a wide spatula shape

that’s bent down & folded backwards—ah!

Only then does she exhale & peer skyward

into a dusty, aproned future of working girls

& divine that her 15^th-century nail might land

on a poet’s desk & into a three-legged tercet.