Almost as prayer,
         the metamorphoses

take you into their fold,
         the shameful dreams
of sunsets framed by the antlers of a deer

or the vision
         of Ouroboros, its spiral
link to an ancient catenary

strung back
         to the mind’s fluidity
making for an out or an around

the dead eyeball of a Sphinx,
         altering its gaze
on horizons and prophecies,

on the drama
         of the isolato,
the urge to be a Bartleby.

The picture (TV had it too)
         –there
a city, pitted streets, pitted people

–old gods under erasure,
         a light revelatory
of the self’s barely

mutable rock,
         the inmost truth
across which history’s shade had fallen.