Joseph Langland Prize, 2017

 

 

Michelangelo had it wrong—his figures chilled,

embalmed as in a cloche of their own milk-light:

her face a blank, a frozen moon the eye skates

without hitching—and he is sleeping, merely,

safe, a child carried to bed. No, grief does not buff

the flesh to gentle resignation, but is this savage

chisel in a primitive’s cramped hand. How else

explain what reaches out to grip me by the throat

so that I stand arrested and accused by what I see—

Christ’s body wrenched beyond repair, a botch

of teeming wounds, all ribcage, and such a Mary—

snarling like a fox caught in a leg-hold—whose gaze

extracts a nauseous prayer and never will forgive me.