Formulary

                     The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
                     Hubert and Jan van Eyck, 1432

Hush, lamb, lavish with blood in madder red,
                             Your varnish overfed, 
              Too fat for this thin season.

Hush, choir—be-rubied, embroidered, unsomber 
                               As the lute tuned
              To your organ’s lustrous umber.

And all you pious press in festal vestments,
                            Silken chevaliers
              And saints, fold up your banners,

Fold in your Flemish wings. We must a wan
                            And wastrel vista 
              Now, at the phlegmatic end

Of spring, swapping our wanton carmines for shamefast 
                              Grisailles and the stern
                 Click of the altarpiece latch.

Here’s the catch: Though we’ve stanched our chansons, 
                              Slouching to matins
             Roughed in our workaday drab,

Yet our grayscales blush under the muffled
                             Thrum through the shut 
               Hinges like the heat

From a woodstove. We are by beauty shrove,
                               And we its pledges 
               Confess it in each intemperate

Pulse at the wrist, in the rash prismatics
                             Of our glances.
              We’ve committed its rubrics

To heart. And to all the blackletter
                            Austeres
              This our inmost responsory:

Vermilion, crimson, cadmium, madder red.

Read more from Issue 15.2.