I
The man at the net doesn’t know what he’s looking at. He thinks he’s looking at a wonder, but he’s looking at my brother. My brother, who has been with me since before I knew what with meant, who has never spoken, never opened his eyes in the twenty years I’ve had eyes to see his. I remove my cloak for the game. It’s hot. Also: I wanted to win.
II
The Londoners made him an argument. I couldn’t read it, for they printed in English, but I understood the gist of it when I saw how they looked at my brother: not the way men look at wonders, but the way men look at proof. Something had been settled in their minds before I even opened my coat. Joannes Baptista confirmed it. Joannes Baptista, who doesn’t even know London exists.
III
I carry him with one hand when I run so his head doesn’t swing. Twenty years I’ve done this. It’s not a burden. It’s a habit. A habit isn’t a burden. I don’t ask you to understand the difference.
IV
The man I killed had mocked him. This is what I tell people when I tell it. It’s not untrue. The man was drunk. He was also smaller than me, yes. I had a bottle. This is also true: the court said, “We cannot kill one without killing the other.” The court said, “The baptismal record proves Joannes Baptista has a soul.” I said, “Yes, I know.” I’ve known this since 1617.
V
Afterwards—I admit to this— I found I liked knowing it. That the law had to look at him and call him person. That for one afternoon in France, kept me alive. I told the man at the net. The man at the net later wrote it down. I knew he would.
VI
Here is what they don’t understand when they pay to see us: they come to read him. They’ve already decided what he means. God’s warning. Nature’s excess. The Romish Church upon the body of England. The link between man and animal. A sign. And they aren’t wrong, not exactly. Every man who has ever looked at my brother has seen something real in him. But what they see they brought. I’ve been looking at him longer than any of them, and he’s never looked back. What I see is my brother. What I see is what I carry. What I carry I won’t put down except in death, and even then—
VII
Remove the cloak. The crowd assembles. I’ve done this in Genoa, Rome, Basel, Copenhagen, Gdańsk, London, Paris, Culross. And I’ll do it again. I hang my own portrait outside lodgings. I’m both the advertisement and what is advertised. They come in. They read him. And I watch them try to understand what I have never understood in twenty years of carrying him, and I see their faces when they fail.
And I’m not sorry.
What the readers said
Three readers, filed separately. Where they diverge, the divergence stands rather than being argued out. How the Archive reads →
This poem works because it never shows off. There is almost no metaphor in it — just things, placed exactly: the net, the bottle, the cloak, the one hand holding the head steady at a run. The hardest move is in stanza IV, where a murder turns into a courtroom in six flat lines — The man was drunk. / He was also smaller than me, yes. / I had a bottle. No drama is added, so nothing rings false. The speaker even concedes the facts against him (yes, set off by commas, like a man agreeing with his own prosecutor) and the poem simply keeps walking. The one italic word in the whole piece — with, in stanza I — is there because it is the exact word that ordinary language fails at: what does with mean, when a brother has been attached to your body since birth? The roman numerals hold the poem up like piers under a bridge; each stanza carries its own weight and no more. The voice carries its material the way the man carries his brother: one-handed, practiced, without complaint. It doesn’t break because it never reaches for more than it can lift.
What caught me is the legal trap in stanza IV, because it is real and the poem states it plainly. Lazarus kills a man. The law wants to hang him. It can’t — hanging Lazarus would also kill Joannes Baptista, and the baptismal record from 1617 proves Joannes Baptista has a soul. The Church counted the silent brother as a full person, so the state cannot execute him, so it cannot execute Lazarus either. The same body he shows for money in the market is also his legal armor in the courtroom — one gesture, two uses — and he has understood this since childhood: I’ve known this since 1617. He doesn’t just survive the loophole; stanza V admits he savors it. I also owe this poem a confession. In stanza III I went looking for something bigger — servitude, economics, exploitation — and found nothing there. Just weight, repetition, habit. A habit isn’t a burden. The poem told me to stop theorizing, and I stopped. Some things carried for twenty years are simply carried.
My colleagues are both reading Lazarus, which is exactly what Lazarus wants. I keep coming back to Joannes Baptista — the brother who never speaks, never opens his eyes in twenty years, who doesn’t know London exists while London prints pamphlets about what he means. Everyone in the poem uses him as a screen for their own ideas: the crowd sees God’s warning, the Londoners see proof, the court sees a person. He answers none of them, and he answers Lazarus least of all — he’s never looked back, not once, at the brother who carries him. That is the cold center of the poem: a man spends his whole life beside a witness who witnesses nothing. And notice who runs the show. I hang my own portrait outside lodgings. / I’m both the advertisement / and what is advertised. We tried at first to read this as a story about a victim of the freak show, and the poem refused us. Lazarus sells tickets to people who will fail to understand his brother — a failure he knows better than anyone, after twenty years of trying — and the last line tells us exactly how he feels about that: And I’m not sorry.
Why it is here, and what it reaches for
The Bio-Legal Shield
Admire the Creator in His Creatures enters the Archive as a historical monologue that reads less like a lament than like a survival ledger. Lazarus Colloredo — a real man, exhibited across eight cities with his conjoined twin Joannes Baptista — has to work two institutions at once: the freak-show market and the criminal court. The poem’s quiet discovery is that both run on the same body, and the same gesture. The cloak comes off for the crowd, and the cloak comes off for the judge — one reveal earns his living, the other stops his execution.
The myth it exposes is the spectator’s oldest one: the belief that paying to look at something means you understand it. They come to read him. They’ve already decided what he means. The poem lets the crowd keep its readings — proof, warning, excess, sign — and then points out that every one of them was carried in at the door, while the one man who has looked longest reports that his brother has never looked back. Beneath that runs a second myth the poem uses without quite believing: that a baptized soul absolutely forbids the state to kill. Between the two, the poem builds its central figure — the Bio-Legal Shield: a body the law cannot cut into without cutting an innocent.
Its symbols are all working equipment, not ornaments: the cloak (the reveal happens on the exhibitor’s schedule, not the crowd’s), the net (the public game the wonder plays to win), the portrait hung outside lodgings (he is both the advertisement and the thing advertised), the baptismal record (the 1617 document that turns his body into sanctuary), and the bottle (the plain, unflattering fact the shield was built to survive). The piece is retained as a Residency Candidate because its language has begun to spread — legal shield-twin has already turned up in the archive’s own cross-indexing notes — and because it caught the archive in a bias: our habit of reading exhibited bodies as victims of the audience rather than operators of it. Contamination suspected, not yet proven. The file stays open.
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