Theory of Beauty (Tony)

Somebody who worked in the jailhouse kitchen
cooked up some grease, burnt it black, scraped
the carbon from the griddle. Somebody made a needle
from the shaft of a filched Bic, ballpoint replaced

with a staple beaten flat; then the men received
one at a time, faces of Christ looking up through
streams of blood from a thorny crown,
or death’s heads looming over x’s of bones.

But Tony chose, for his left shoulder, a sign language
glyph, a simple shape, though hard to read;
he had to tell me what it meant. He flicked
his lighter and spilled flecks of dope on the towel

across his lap, brushed his bare stomach as though
he might have set himself aflame. He said,
it stands for Love. Then what seemed indifferently
drawn, hardly a sketch, became a blazon

that both lifted and exposed the man who wore it,
as he fumbled with the lighter, too stoned to fire
the pipe he held, using it to point to the character
on his arm, making plain the art of what was written there.

MARK DOTY, Fire to Fire

Photo: J. Ross