Formulary

Kimberly Johnson

The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb

Hubert and Jan van Eyck, 1432

Hush, lamb, lavish with blood in madder red,                        Your varnish overfed,            Too fat for this thin season.Hush, choir—be-rubied, embroidered, unsomber                        As the lute tuned            To your organ’s lustrous umber.And all you pious press in festal vestments,                        Silken chevaliers            And saints, fold up your banners,Fold in your Flemish wings. We must a wan                        And wastrel vista            Now, at the phlegmatic endOf spring, swapping our wanton carmines for shamefast                        Grisailles and the stern            Click of the altarpiece latch.Here’s the catch: Though we’ve stanched our chansons,                        Slouching to matins            Roughed in our workaday drab,Yet our grayscales blush under the muffled                        Thrum through the shut            Hinges like the heatFrom a woodstove. We are by beauty shrove,                        And we its pledges            Confess it in each intemperatePulse at the wrist, in the rash prismatics                        Of our glances.            We’ve committed its rubricsTo heart. And to all the blackletter                        Austeres            This our inmost responsory:Vermilion, crimson, cadmium, madder red.

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Kimberly Johnson is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Uncommon Prayer (Persea, 2004), and of book-length translations of Virgil (Penguin Classics, 2009) and Hesiod (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Recipient of grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she lives in Salt Lake City.

The Cincinnati Review

Winter 2019

Cincinnati, Ohio

University of Cincinnati

Poetry Editor
Rebecca Lindenberg

Managing Editor
Lisa Ampleman

Editor-at-Large
Don Bogen

Since its inception in 2003, The Cincinnati Review has published many promising new and emerging writers as well as Pulitzer Prize winners and Guggenheim and MacArthur fellows. Poetry and prose from our pages have been selected to appear in the annual anthologies Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, New Stories from the South, Best American Short Stories, Best American Fantasy, Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the Midwest, and Best Creative Nonfiction.

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