NIKE/HERCULES
Each
inch of earth a threshold, another step, another dream. Behind
a scrim bleached with their blood reverent animals stalk: lion and boar,
man-eating mares, thousands of ravaging
birds, the Hydra with multi-warheads
waiting for the celebrants to disappear with their apparition
of this marginal sight.
Looked
at from the future: Gathered before a Hero
whose strength gives peaceful pretensions the stigma of a bloody
nose, to whom Victory is cognate
to death's cold stare running one end of Hell to the Other.
Pilgrims
bathe in a vision of sunset. Their children hold santos
of a hi-tech god in a land that double-crosses itself.
In what have we come to believe? A camera
snaps, a rocket flies a mechanical bird of prey, steaming tail streaking
to its own interception, ground radar out, ghost-horses
carry it across the sky.
Sirocco
winds sharpen themselves on flanges of the Hero's weakening
flanks
standing guard with his
nose in the air.
