True peasant-dark, that Siberian claw—
drawn out of birch and ice into their law,
gone soft with silk but animal, the skin,
to Petersburg, his hunger dressed as peace.
Soon the empress sends her women after him;
dawn to dark, where blood finds no release—
upon her boy, he breathes his mudded word
construed as covenant—the bleeding stilled.
Again he feeds; again she calls him Lord,
kneeling as the boyars measure out his will—
before the feast must turn to discipline—
condemn him to the ice-locked room,
shriving every rank and matted sin;
unmoored into the gloaming, out of view.

He fell off the balustrade, another
small misstep toward glory, just one among
the litany of injuries my brother
has endured during his short life—each one
a peculiar work of art, prosaic
yet absurd. He’s the jester of martyrs,
the black comic who has enough nicks,
gouges, and breaks to have suffered,
all told, one fatal round of martyrdom.
More Buster Keaton than St. Teresa,
(whose beatific guise belies marble
but still does not suspend my disbelief)
he laughs, doubled over in the front yard,
then tries to walk, stumbling toward sainthood.

A cross-dissolve might be construed
as too sentimental for a seasoned eye
in a non-antiquarian such as you.
Which is to say, you would decide
to show the portrait of the young aesthete
enjambed against an ailing patriarch,
like Kubrick’s up-cranked primate
hurling his bone in a heavenly arc
cutting to an indolent craft in focus,
marking epochs in between
the static grace of Discobolus
anticipating still this box of dreams
and a thousand statues flickering in the dark.
That would be you. You’d drive the reel ahead
past creaking scenes, past dialogue and arc,
past diegesis heavy with the dead,
past hemlock, ailing masters, acolytes conjoined,
and say: Just cut to the fucking point.