Lichtenstein
       

Nothing moves. The peninsula, ragged
as iced bitumen, accusatory
steam fog marking invisible Cuba,
seems to point back at him, necessity's flawed
child, lost in his marginal thicket,
grasped by a nameless stasis. The croton's
showery welder's sparks drift to his feet
and singe them. Nothing moves. He turns
within the radioactive scroll's stillness,
its Archimedean point arched on his knees
the same moment his damaged silhouette
stumbles through the brush of a qualified
silence, flagrant with hypostasis!
And so, moon-struck at the moon-wanderer,
he turns back to sea-sorrow underlined
earlier, alters the hyphen to a plus
sign, returns to Caliban and writes "cane."
Another stillness. The worse, a fiction
that will not pass as history to myth
as his face goes from mythic to misery,
smeared with the cane-sorrow green of rich loss,
his island's only profit: a rich loss,
the green he hears scythes any ears which eavesdrop,
not for cadence but the estranged sense of
that embittered, suspended word, cane, ringing
like the marvellous absence of daylight
stars, like an old TV set expiring
yet failing and aggrieved, dreams the scriptures'
intertestamental period, that blank
short circuiting districts with holy fire,
lit backwards each day by flailing prophets.
He has seen them go into the fire.
He has seen them come out of the fire.
Profits? Look at this phylogenetic
face emitting light, eclipsing his face!
Mooncalf's nigra sum unconceding bright
laminates noon, half-redeemed, and draws near
from the horizon the unburnt effigy,
which hangs like a lantern in the crotons.
It is now he sees aslant the solstice
looking back at him, that what he has torn
has rescind the hereafter-cheap-solace
to name the bigger light where name, for him,
means malice, and to confound with malice
his birthright held in abeyance of trust,
blurring with elsewhere, unseen, as he writes
(around the torn mouth) "Christianity?"
What he inscribes a thunder severs, then
a lightning flash gathers, in Lichtenstein,
the man-child, there, soot-eyed potentate, sits
hazily fingering a horologe;
with one hand, estimates the transaction
of the world, with the other, writes decrees punishing
inauthentic restlessness, attended
by a host of cabbage moths. Lichtenstein,
of all places, faux neutral fable,
brilliantly reflecting a borrowed light
purged of all memory, or if not purged,
dropped into a kenosis, not so much
different from his, now filling the margin
with crosses, pushing his cursus mixtus
to find a word, only one, without doubt,
without impatience, he could write and still
his mirrored face from drifting to its vast
throne room the sublunary stained-glass echoes
nones: Kali’na, Kari’nja, Kali’nya,
and a hidden bird mourns Kari’pona
Kari’pona, Kari’pona, nonstop
(for if it shows itself it would be killed
for once forgetting The Lost Name, screeching
instead, out of sheer spite, Trismegistus.)
Worst things yet when The Lost Name flings the clock,
splitting quiet to ground-glass effulgence,
which glints splendid violence like a Reichstag rave,
and then rides into the mountains to set great
hecatombs into motion. A motto
bleeds red on a banner WISE TO MALICE,
swiped from Priest VB who died at midnight.
Smoke covers the peak seeking to unveil
of what God's self-disclosure consists of.
But that slips away. The bigger light dims.
Recurrent nightmares. Recurrent slaughters.
In between, a certain peace crescendoes,
as of distant rain about to supplant
the stars, but finding a lost thing, off guard,
looking up, hearing feebly cobalt
statics. The Lost Thing seems momentarily
repaired, and can tell what the tempest tells
before it plummets right as he alters
sea-change, switching its servile deficit,
the hyphen, beyond the interrupting
rain's quota recounting feudal tribute,
rifts, just to be compensated to live,
carried over the prime meridian
the heavy spoils of forbearance music
he hears and sees what Daniel heard and saw,
"a wailing descant on the sweetest ground,"
the changed sea, now argon-blue, stammering
with what the boy is about to recite.
Conjunction of the moths and of the stars.

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Copyright © 2022 Ishion Hutchinson All rights reserved
from Smartish Pace
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission