Serially Pulled Devotion Plate, Monogrammed Upper Rhenish Burin

Before it is a martyr, it is a sheet of copper scored by a burin held at a goldsmith's angle, each furrow cut to hold ink and release it under the press, and then pulled — pulled again, and again, as many times as the plate would bear before its walls softened. That is the tender thing, and the amusing thing: the swelling calf and the taut binding cord at the ankle, the curling hair engraved strand by strand, the arrows entering the flank with such patient hatching that the flesh seems to dimple around them — all of it genuine, disciplined, lovely, and made expressly so that it need never be made only once. The limitation sits where the eye is meant to rest last, dead center in the blank lower margin: the crossed initials, planted like a hallmark punched into a silver cup, advertising the workshop beneath the saint as surely as a beaten vessel is stamped beneath its chasing. The margins are left wide and clean because the sheet was stock in transit, a sorrow to be owned in multiple; the drooping head arrives identically in a hundred parlours, and here the touch turns fond — grief cut to specification, priced by the impression, invoiced as though anguish kept its value best when it could be duplicated by evening. A people who give their finest carving to the sea by nightfall find the striving sweet, this copper labouring to fix a body forever and to bill for the fixing, mistaking the ability to reprint suffering for the suffering itself, mistaking a maker's stamp for a soul. So the little crossed cipher is not a signature but a price tag that learned to genuflect — a receipt certifying the going rate for pulling the wound again, and asking, so seriously, to be worshipped as the wound. — NLR