The descent from Elbrus

Prometheus wasn't chained to that rock

because he stole fire. He stole fire

because he was chained to that rock. 

The story is told backwards, don't you see,

to make an enigma of the obvious, which is this: 

there is no such thing as power, human or divine. 

Every apparent expression or exertion of power 

is to compensate for its absence. 

We feign authority, control, agency,

because we have none. It's all a pose.  

Every punchline, every announcement, 

every declaration, every statement, 

every convention we observe or flout

about what is important or unimportant, 

cycles of oppression and liberation,

history, violence we inflict on others 

to compel them to comply with our will,

are all a kind of petty larceny, 

us picking the pockets of the gods

for a box of matches, only to discover

the gods don't have the power to make fire. 

The matches won't light. We made that story up.

We stood there, looking foolish, 

so we made the story up to spare our blushes. 

There is a lost epic that contradicts our theogonies

in which we only steal each other's poverty.

We need to believe someone, somewhere, 

is powerful, because we are powerless,

because there is no such thing as power. 

Prometheus' theft was more profound. 

He exposed the impossibility of power.

That is why we fantasise his punishment. 

On Lethe wharf

What lost Elsinore, 

what forgotten Camelot,

is turned over by the plough?

We are worms in the marrow 

of their defeated champions

and crown liars in the dust 

to rule our misremembered realm. 

The fortress I built to protect myself

has become my prison

though I furnish it like a palace. 

I run away. I escape. I am pursued. 

I am lost in the camouflage I conceal myself in, 

become the forest, become Brocéliande,

and everything important falls away

like leaves the trees discard in autumn.

Let me lose this wasted self. 

Let the wind scatter my confetti soul.

Let each guiding star achieve its zenith

only to drain itself into the deepest well

until all of its light is extinguished

and no-one can point out where it once rose.

Let the well provide a draught of anonymous light

to amazed, untutored cottars, who drive the plough,

so fields they sow with broken castles

yield crops of marvellous astronomy

and the Earth becomes the sky and passes away.  

To be nothing is enough 

when one cannot be whole.

Every star is an aperture 

through which some soul falls,

its world receding as it descends 

until it is just a distant point of light

and the soul forgets its limits

and becomes a part of everything

unless it succumbs to vertigo,

the tug of ego, 

and is earthbound once more.

Then time and her retinue of lies

dismantle and divide us into parts,

fragments we defend with many deaths,

and we pretend they make a pretty pattern

when recorded in our chronicles,

discerning purpose where there is none,

for time exists before memory, 

innocent of recollection,

and saturates this amnesiac land

where myths tease us with mysterious toponyms.

Stone monuments protrude and pose their riddles,

stubborn dentistry of the ancients, 

prehistory biting into the present,

the past embedded in our experience, 

subject to our speculations and etiologies

which will, in time, be forgotten,

to be repeated as if original

by other scholars unaware of precedent

and that there is nothing new

given sufficient passage of time. 

Memory absolves our crimes 

and gilds our misery

through the spurious agency 

the act of remembering confers, 

memory as penance,

but to be truly forgiven we must forget.

New empires rise 

cradled in the wreckage of the old.

New faiths formalise ancient heresies.

We cite creature comfort to extenuate our crimes,

crucify the sky with rocket propelled nails

and tease evil from the innocent atom,

while traumatised, brutalised, blinkered people 

stumble through and scrape the raped world's ruin

too numb to scrutinise or criticise the billionaires

or the sanctimonious sadism of their project, 

as they hoard the withered world's dwindling wealth 

while plying us with vacuous platitudes about growth,

their mausoleums the paperweights of history

from Castel San Angelo to Les Invalides, 

and our unleavened ashes will feed 

a nameless, blind, prowling nocturnal truth

that would incinerate our tongues 

had we the wit to speak it, 

and our humanity is a pretence

we are deprived of by knowledge

of what we truly are, so we must forget. 

I withdraw to a remote forest hermitage. 

The north wind exposes leaks 

in a roof I thought weather tight,

driving rain into secret declivities

to slip past all seals laid 

against the world's intrusion

and infiltrate my refuge. 

Will the roofless ruin

this edifice will become

after a few generations of neglect

find itself swept away

in a slow torrent of time

that proceeds drip by drip? 

Perhaps all that can remain

is the prayer I make tonight.

Polaris holds court 

at the centre of the star-swirl, 

the celestial vortex through which we fall,

bending the path of every wanderer

around himself. To him I make petition. 

Let me not forget what I learned when I forgot.

Let me carry this sacred absence, this unknowing

that contains time unviolated by description,

make of my heart a vessel of emptiness

that will shatter should it contain anything

and prevent it from being filled

with today's quotidian romp and riot and rot and gossip

for love contingent is not love at all. 

Summon zodiacs to guard my insignificance, 

and preserve the glory I experience

when I encounter the nothingness I am,

because to be nothing 

is the only wholeness I can know 

under the orbit to which my star is bound.

The drought

When I was a child the stakes were high. 

People were not people, these first humans, 

they were mountain ranges that divided the world. 

They were stars and sunsets, tides and seasons, 

life and death, ancestors and oblivion,

inclusion and exile, famine and abundance. 

I came to rely on the dependability of drought. 

I followed the Polaris of my abandonment

into the desert where horizons melt in Moonlight. 

Aloof, I observed remote, cosmic forces struggle

from my ledge on the precipice high above the plain

with no companion. It was only once I was older

that I realised it was not the gods who play games, 

moving people like pieces ruled by cruelty and chance. 

It was me all along, unable to see them as human

until I had recognised that quality in myself. 

The seed's secret is the flower it becomes,

and the seed is always the last to find that out. 

My heart breaks for the person I was

now that I must give up the sacred solitude

where I protected the child I was from the world,

now that the rains have come and I must grow.

The wound

My soul is a quiver full of arrows, 

all the different lives I've lived,

my heart the target I aim to hit

and more often miss, often enough

to wonder if it is a mirage,

to wonder what part of me really exists

beyond the motions I go through, 

draw, aim, release, and follow.

Before I healed from the wound I received

I could not forgive the one who wounded me. 

After I healed there was nothing to forgive

as if the injury happened to someone else.

I was two different people, connected

only by a faint and unreliable recollection.

I fletch these lives and fire them.

I try to persuade myself they are the same

because they hit the same target, but I miss. 

Perhaps the wound did not afflict one life. 

Perhaps it split life into many splinters. 

Perhaps the damage can not be known

while I am limited to living just one of them

at a time, the latest nocked on the bowstring.  

I will continue with this hopeful archery

and gather them all once my quiver is empty

and they are just a bundle of sticks, 

not arrows anymore.