A Coin Is a Map to a Beheading
The vulnerability of the figurehead is at the center of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting of Charles I: most kings get their heads cut off.
When English dissenters put the concept of divine right on trial in 1649, it was Charles I’s head that rolled into the London gutter. Neither God nor Milton would save him.
His judges and executioners fled, or tried to flee, to the semi-theocratic world of the Connecticut colony to hide among other puritans and pionniers.
Everything is torqued by the syntax of relation: a supreme subject becomes an object, who once made objects of his subjects.
When the tables of power turned over on the historical King, and later turned on his judges and executioners, bodies were exhumed, dismembered, their heads put on spikes for public display, their pieces thrown into a mass grave.
The image of the colonies is a snake chopped into thirteen slices.
The image of the president is a slaveholder cutting down a tree.
Regicide and fugitivity, crime and escape from punishment.
Exile Anne Hutchinson; publish Cotton Mather. Elect Thomas Jefferson; deny Sally Hemings. Empower Clarence Thomas; pillory Anita Hill.
Watch the house of social death being built for anyone who tells.
When English dissenters put the concept of divine right on trial in 1649, it was Charles I’s head that rolled into the London gutter. Neither God nor Milton would save him.
His judges and executioners fled, or tried to flee, to the semi-theocratic world of the Connecticut colony to hide among other puritans and pionniers.
Everything is torqued by the syntax of relation: a supreme subject becomes an object, who once made objects of his subjects.
When the tables of power turned over on the historical King, and later turned on his judges and executioners, bodies were exhumed, dismembered, their heads put on spikes for public display, their pieces thrown into a mass grave.
The image of the colonies is a snake chopped into thirteen slices.
The image of the president is a slaveholder cutting down a tree.
Regicide and fugitivity, crime and escape from punishment.
Exile Anne Hutchinson; publish Cotton Mather. Elect Thomas Jefferson; deny Sally Hemings. Empower Clarence Thomas; pillory Anita Hill.
Watch the house of social death being built for anyone who tells.
Notes:
"A Coin Is a Map to a Beheading" is from Liontaming in America (New Directions, 2024). © 2024 by Elizabeth Willis. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Source: Poetry (September 2024)