by Chad Parmenter.
NOTES FOR A COMIC BOOK ARTIST TO SEE BY
Make it Christmas, so the holes of white light
in the blank, black sky hold the haloes
of each erasure of a star.
Commissioner Gordon handing Batman a red
box in a green bow.
Batman: SORRY, JIM, THE ONLY GIFT
I CAN TAKE IS PAIN.
Closeup on the Arkham Asylum sign.
Gordon freeing Hugo Strange (Golden Age
maker of monsters), light like ice on his spectacles.
The monster: Wintergeist. Use your own powers
of visualization. Like Iceland hybridized with
a chandelier, fragile enough to be shattered by light,
it can‟t hurt anything.
This is the gift you‟ll write into Batman‟s hands:
a weapon to hit from far away; let it spit a signifier
of fire.
Sound effects: SHUSH SHUSH SHUSH
Make them that dark-light alternation—white
like snow seen on tv. That bright.
End with a downtown Christmas vista
oranged over with the color of destruction.
Here‟s the story that ghosts
the batfantasia, if it will help you
make the lines dark and thick:
I‟m seven years younger.
Masks of snow thicken the soles of my shoes.
The wander behind my girlfriend turns her
from indigo figurehead
to blue rune.
I focus on her, let our cohered tunnel
vision white out the art building
I used to belong to,
and in combat boots
she‟s snowshoeing past its missing windows
to me, and I think I must have been thinking
who better to live with me in the
SHANTIH SHANTIH SHANTIH dead peace of the end of The Wasteland,
where there were no heroes except fears,
because her living room glows with tv snow,
and her breath froths out
in soft monsters
that a wave of a glove
tears open.
See—Wintergeist as Christmas past:
a tracery of gray steam, splintering into silver air.
When Batman finishes him off,
don‟t let his mouth round up into a grin;
leave it as the slash that shows
you jabbed your pen using something
that hurt you to remember, too.
Then inhale. Now let it go