I stood in our moonless courtyard before dawn, swaying sleepily,
Looking at the nonsense splatter of stars, doing the human thing
Myself, throwing meaning. Perhaps they face a common enemy,
The dragon and the hunter, the serpent, tail draped over the vault's arch
From the north, the square-shouldered knight in the south,
The monster and the trickster, the treasure lurking in its mountain lair,
The storm god hurling lightning from the sky, the animal, the cultural,
And that's what we always got wrong. The hunter pulls his bow and aims
Near the same spot toward which the serpent aims its open jaws.
What are they attacking? Defending? What alarms them, fierce creatures?
Something that couldn't be glimpsed from my perspective, me, little
person
Who can casually talk of dragging loves with him to witness his disaster.
It is disaster, whatever it is, disaster hidden behind the great scalloped wall
Of West Temple, blackest in starlight, in the dark beyond, forever west.
Just taste the word, once-glittering star crunched like glass in the mouth.
Negative star, non-star, not out there, disaster. That's what Orion's aiming at.
That's why Draco recoils and opens his fanged mouth light years. We've
been
Fooling ourselves, lying to ourselves that they're up there
Fighting each other, those poor, scattered sparks flaring up
Briefly, when all's said and done, before their common enemy,
Storied altar of stories, of sacrifice, all-swallowing dark.
No comments:
Post a Comment