Narcissus Under a Saffron Sky
This is a poem of mine that appeared in the journal Lydwine. I’ve been writing somewhat apocalyptic poems for the last year or so…can’t imagine why:
Narcissus Under a Saffron Sky
The red sun, flinging saffron threads across the sky, lowers
to the curved horizon of mountains, sea, a sailboat bobbing
on the waves, stuck in the dead air. Its owner leans
over the edge, his fat knees planted like stakes
in the seat cushions, his face, slick and gray, as he looks
into the water, the swirling mass, the irredeemable, hard
malleability of it. With one flick of his wrist, he could toss
anything overboard, watch it fall into another realm
like Adam and Eve, flung from the garden, the angel’s sword
at their backs, the taste of sweetness corrupting on their tongues.
Even as they ate, innocence cracked, like a bone bent to breaking.
Oh you, my first parents, you who heard the voice of God
like a mother’s whispered song and were held in the arms of the Lord
like children by their father, what blurred reflection did you see
in that shiny fruit? What sound knelled in your ears as you scurried
into the newly wounded world? And how can I, the child of your child,
I who have not beheld the face of God, how can I know His voice?
I am part of the herd torn from the hollow of eternity, stained by the Fall,
that first turn away from goodness towards the flick of the serpent’s tongue.
Now, priests prepare for a black mass and we throw babies into the deep,
insatiable chasm, slick with other sacrifices. Like our first parents,
like Narcissus, we kneel at the lake, stare at shiny things. We gaze
upon ourselves, the dead already forgotten, the world only a frame,
the stakes unseen. The man in the boat kneels toward his own reflection
while the sky is lit with stars and the horizon curves back to the garden.
The cross rises from the hollow of eternity. The angel's sword is sheathed.
Adam and Eve are naked again, sated. The serpent is silent. And all of us,
their children, are clear eyed, unherded, our souls retrieved
by the hard malleability of that strange grace
that restores innocence, bone by bone, face by face.