Read Poem: Dear John, by Liam Flake

“Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness,” 1604 by Caravaggio

I catch you in the gallery but you won’t meet my eyes
— a regular Holden Caufield. You’re reclined on your crimson and slouch
like a teen in the principal’s office. John, I’ve heard your blood ties to divinity,
your prophecies and myths, but here you sit with little more than your staff and furs.
Have you grown thin on honey and locusts? Is it a thrill to be wild
and swaddle yourself in darkness?

John, do you know you are amputated and bisected in chiaroscuro?
You are a Cheshire cat, features peering from a blank sheet with the eyes
emerging last. It took me a while but I see now that wilderness
suits you even as it swallows you. John, you bow and crouch
like a wounded child. You cling bashfully to your furs
as if they can tell you something you can’t divine.

John I see through you, through all your divinities,
your brooding and your baptisms. You turn from light like the dark
side of a moon — framed in empty space, moored only by your furs.
There’s no beauty in gauntness. Do you see yourself in smoke? Your eyes
are stone underbellies where salamanders dream. You slouch
casually on your velvet sofa that is blood-ridden mountains: such finery for wilderness.

You are more a realist than I could have imagined, hair wild
and features washed out in the camera flash. It seems to me that your divinity
is evidenced now only by your
framing spotlight; otherwise,
you are a lone traveler slouching
on a bus, or a beam of light knocking around the shadowed
caverns of a pinball machine. John, the critics see you by your shades; your eyes
are dustbowls. You must have paid handsomely for those furs.

Despite your protests you are a beacon amidst these firs —
your skin is reflective tape in headlights, gaudy against the wilderness.
And yet, you are no messiah, more boy than prophet. Your eyes
are unsettled grudges, the absence of something forgotten that was once divine,
the slots and vacancies at the back of a darkly
lit closet. You grumble and slouch,

play at nonchalance, always the actor to your own suffering. I draw your slouched
posture in regalia but halos have grown gauche so we leave only the furs
and the cloak, your edges archipelagos punctuating a penumbral
sea. I’m not sure we’ll ever see the end of this wilderness
or if they’ll remember us in metaphors. What does it mean to be divine?
Take my hand. The myths I will tell of you will be of the hurt in your eyes.

John, I start to think that your furs are fake, and that your divinities
are cereal box reprints. It’s not your fault. You turn, slouch back to your wilderness
like a beast towards Bethlehem, patron saint always of darkened eyes