Etching of the Plague Years

In the valley of your art history book, the corpses stack in the back of a cart drawn by an ox whose rolling shoulder muscles show its considerable weight. He does this often. His velvet nostrils flare to indicate the stench. It’s the smell you catch after class while descending a urine-soaked subway stair on a summer night in a neighborhood where cabs won’t drive: the odor of dead flowers, fear multiplied a thousand times. The train door’s hiss seals you inside with a frail boy swaying from a silver hoop. He coughs in your direction, his eyes are burn holes in his face. Back in the fourteenth-century print lying in your lap, a hand white as an orchid has sprouted from the pyramid of flesh. It claws the smoky air. Were it not for that, the cart might carry green cordwood (the human body knobby and unplaned). Wrap your fingers around your neck and feel the stony glands. Count the holes in your belt loop for lost weight. In the black unfurling glass, study the hard planes of your face. Compare it to the prom picture in your wallet, the orchid pinned to your chest like a spider. Think of the flames at your high school bonfire licking the black sky, ashes rising, innumerable stars. The fingers that wove with your fingers have somehow turned to bone. The subway shudders between dark and light. The ox plods across the page. Think of everyone you ever loved: the boy who gets off at your stop is a faint ideogram for each. Offer him your hand. Help him climb the stair.