Theme For A Late-Night Radio Documentary About The Final Causes Of Monsters (According To Leibniz) Poem by Mark Leci

For a flicker of history there was a boy,
Only four feet six feet seven feet tall.
He was young to the point of being ancient,
A painter of thick black character.

His face
Was industrial smoke,
Radiation,
A caveman Proteus.

He was outcast to the centre of his town,
To the well under the pine tree,
The needles dug into his feet
Where the world collapsed into singularity.

He fled to the mountains,
Trailing radioactive stars, wilting at will,
Closed in death-grey clothing.

Eventually he climbed a peak,
Point like an ashen eagle’s eye.
The snow stung his flesh,
And the pine trees drove him further
Up the slope.

At the summit, oh glorious needle,
He found a face,
An old man peering quizzically from the rocks,
An island in a sea of grey.

Boy sat cross-legged,
Arched and warped,
His violin-bowed rotten wood legs,
And spoke.

He told the old man of his home,
Where he was pelted with gazes,
Pointed like needles,
Fled from the trees, the wall.

He used to go to the Modern Art Museum in New York.
In a bustled shroud, gazing at the hideous beauty,
The wood reminded him of his mother,
But that was a thing he could never remember,
It was a memory he could never erase.

The old man sat craggy and silent,
But sometimes tiny pebbles
Would tumble down his face,
Bouncing on his slate-smooth cheeks.

The boy smiled, gave his name, smiled.
He spoke about the art he had seen,
The brush he used for his remote makeup,
Snowflakes haloed his head.

The old man gathered snow on his nose,
Which didn’t melt, but clung to his overcast eyes
And ran over his lip. He didn’t smile. Or smiled.

The boy sighed, stood, brushed off the snow with his meat hook hand.
The old man’s maybe smile crumbled, and more pebbles skidded on the slate.

The boy stretched his crow legs
And strode down the mountain,
Leaving his name in brushed off snow
On the stone face of the world.