After Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome Writing
This parchment once was a calf dappled in fear but here Jerome extends himself over
the rack while a rose through the ages silently swallows his tight strung skin & read in
the red folds letters made of a madder plant the words of a slave suffering above him in
the faint slivers of widening light sliced with a knife that flays no mistake but dull mutters
like a flame until the cardinal consumes him—
Ars Materiarum
The eddy
that unravels in the air
ahead of us
& the flickering lamp
the wax lemon
that waters a child’s mouth
the control & cadence
of a dump truck driver
the meter of everyman,
woman and myth
that appears like a question
& we wake up
& palm it
under an overpass
where the old beer
of a reaved one
is poured out as a libation
that quenches the concrete
& the faint worm
in the pocket of dirt
on the sidewalk
slowly
rolls
squirms
shimmer
in the rhythm of
all things
About the Poet
Andrew Hanson is a writer and poet living in Miami, FL, and has been published in the Broadkill Review, the Bookend Review, the Ekphrastic Review, Agony Opera, Thirty West and more.