Ecce Homo
by Alexandra Teague
About attribution, they were apparently
often wrong, the art curators, so they’ve made a game
called Find the Real Bosch: ten fantastical canvases
grouped on a wall: the strange and ordinary equally
suspect: bird-headed men, thatched houses,
demons in barnyards like carnivorous potted plants,
the daily freakishness our ancestors blamed on witchcraft
and the magnetizing moon their faces slope out of orbit
toward, their chins and foreheads lengthening; what we’d call,
now, birth defects from chemicals, malnutrition, meth—
though corporations like the 16th-century devil
are skilled at diffusing, confusing responsibility: the bay
breeding (who’s to say how) two-headed fish, snake-necked spiders
with wings like an orchid. Our own faces wobbling
in our mirrors like Plato’s cave-wall made in a sweatshop:
to each his own cheap, bendy reality: behold the man
of European feudalism or late-stage capitalism: the guard,
like most museum guards, Black and older, bouncing
slightly, like his back hurts, on his rubber shoes,
urging us to look again at details, hinting “most guess #5
The Last Judgement.” The most Boschlike, so clearly,
here, a ringer, a Once Attributed To, a By A Follower Of.
A swarm of white, bulbed nakedness and hoods,
a KKK rally in some medieval Tennessee warped
like a bell jar. The flames of the world’s meanness
licking glass, the people pouring through the open mouth
of a head, both dirt and human. This cannot end well.
This has never ended well. Christ in Limbo on another canvas,
white lily—wilt-strung above the strange-hatted men
who’ll kill him. Everywhere, legs crawling without bodies.
Peasants sweeping dirt from dirt floors, breeding pale
children who will breed pale children, proud
to learn the word Prestidigitator. A simple magic trick
of language, like saying Your epidermis is showing!
as we did in junior high in the Ozarks, crawling from hills
of lice and snot-crusty Valentines toward cars
and joints and each other’s pale bodies. Ecce Homo—
as if beholding is any kind of answer. A magician
doing the ancient cup trick, the people falling for it:
guessing Limbo, Adultery. The Adoration of the Magi
(the guard has to finally tell us): one magus regal, ebony
in white pleats, the others—like Christ, Mary, and Joseph—
sunburned pink; their cloaks pink too like vaginal, tropical
swamp flowers. Dressed alike, as if they “got the memo,”
as we used to say, sometimes still say in meetings—
straddling our knife blades; serrated in our need to belong
to our insect-headed, flame-spouting fellow humans;
and desperate to stand out: arrows through our hat brims,
toilet-plunger crowns. All the degradation, mistakes,
good acts, and strange sins we can concoct in the spewing
fountain of bodies done already. All of it done before.
ALEXANDRA TEAGUE is most recently the author of Or What We’ll Call Desire (Persea, 2019). Her prior books are The Wise and Foolish Builders and Mortal Geography, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and the California Book Award in Poetry, and the novel The Principles Behind Flotation, as well as the co-edited Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Alexandra has recently returned from Cardiff, Wales, to Moscow, Idaho, where she is a professor at the University of Idaho.