To the Carver Who Sculpted the Headstone of James Charlis, Born in Kells, County Meath, in 1796

When sacred artists write an icon they believe it incomplete, until Greek letters fix it before God; though I distrust words as I walk among chiseled, fading names on this fog-damped hill, where the part that lives still at James Charlis's grave is a barrel-chested Christ: sandstone, not Italian marble, and carved with whatever tools were at hand. His dwarf-heavy head falls well short of the cross-bar toward which his blunt arms stretch, pinned in place by dull nails—a misshapen figure entirely of this world, that somehow mirrors a soul. Bless your hand, who worked this stubby Christ. Whoever you were, you lacked the artist's usual skills of deception. And bless the wounded grace of this figure, its holy clumsiness, just as we bless and thank the gaunt monks whose quills drew the wide-eyed savior in that book a Welshman thought angelic. The man below was also a child of Kells.