for Jonathan Barker
When they were flesh and blood, these deities
were local, like the fauna: oddly cruel,
yet human in their faults and, if not quite
dependable, then mischievous, at least,
in ways we understood, some imp or sphinx
probing the life it would mar
with delicate talons,
another form of love or self-defeat
unfolding in the dark
like fleece, or fire.
Now, there is nothing but white
and that lull in the stone
that makes us think of beauty going under,
a myth of naming buried in their eyes
and everything else immersed
in a drowse of heat:
frogs in the marguerites and the wakened
hedgehog at the far edge of the park,
hunting for snails
in a river of wind and yarrow;
and this is the grief
our stories prepared us for,
a ghost in the undergrowth,
hungry for nectar and blood,
and something we ought to have known,
without being told,
slinking towards us
out of the afternoon,
tender and wild
and blind to our fondest desires.
We have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why
they fail to love us,
turning away, like parents who cannot conceal
their disappointment, knowing, from the first,
that we are doomed, as they are, to a stark
momentum: something hidden in the grass
outwearing us, who never know our fates,
and drowning them, in abstract, like the dreams
they once replaced, in waves of moss and ivy.