(after Zbigniew Herbert)
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.