Face Not Made by Hands, Carved and Reprinted

Start with the size, you: a strip barely wider than your palm, the kind of thing a bookmark envies, and onto that scrap it loads the one image that supposedly outranks every painter alive — the face that stamped itself onto cloth with no brush, no chisel, no maker at all. That is the boast written into the very premise: holy because untouched, sacred because handless. A duel is dull against a weakling, so hear me be fair — the cutter is magnificent. The thorn-crown bites deep, the beard and hair coil down like water that has found its own slope, the graded dark behind the skull was gouged by someone who knew precisely how much a matrix will forgive. The tears sit clean under each eye. And there in the corner sits "HL," a knife-hand signing, proud, the one thing the picture swore no hand had done.

That is the round already lost, and the sheet has no throat to argue. Listen: it sells you a relic prized for being handless, then delivers that handlessness as timber carved and pressed a hundred times before the shop closed. My people measured wealth by what a horse could carry to the world's edge — light, single, unrepeatable, yours alone. This one measures a miracle by the depth of the drawer it stacks in, and calls the stack a wonder. Then the paperwork, soft as a wet-nurse, tucks the contradiction under "Prints," shelves the not-made-by-hands between an etching and an engraving, and asks the room to admire the shading. So here is my verse, and it cannot answer: you have not preserved a mystery, you have inventoried it — filed a mass-cut cult token as a nice impression and let the whole paradox go quiet. Look at the head lifting out of nothing, thorns sharp, tears cut to order, waiting to be loved as craft by anyone too polite to notice it is a woodblock impersonating a wound. It stares. It cannot blink. Round to me. — AD