A CIVILIZATION

I

Nobility asserts
and not without
an audience, though
applause bedecks
the mind, dares not
take hand. Given
scent, the people
follow: example
and another.
Soon, the code
morality assembles.
Lives stride
to mean. Raindrops
rippling silt
one day fossilized.
Good becomes.

IV

A need for why
replenishes
with morning. Face
questions face,
razors change
the premise: new
seeming new.
And what, it asks,
are we, to be
questioned by
our premises?
Vertigo, fear.
Hold quickly to
the strap of reason,
stay questioning
with facts.
But there are few,
so few, and the light
disputes them.

October

Notice how night refuses to wait. No sooner have commuters found their
cars than wraiths and changelings fan gauzy shadows over walks and driveways.
Each claims a relative or two in this life, consumers of beans and gravity
at home, uncostumed, deep in shallow thought as electronic news of imperceptible
political consequence arcs down to the carpet. Imagine if the doorbell rang
and there, before you, was a man in alpine cap and lederhosen, torch in hand,
exhorting you to join him in the hunt. A monster is afoot and crashing through
the brittle woods at suburb's edge. It's neither man nor beast, but an inhabitant
of that dark gulf between the you softening in sweats and slippers and the you
who ruts and runs along the game trails, leaving clumps of matted fur on broken
twigs, foaming at the sound of human voices. Such small points of wavering light
against the hillside, such puny cries of encouragement from the unmappable swamp.
The damned thing could be anywhere -- behind, ahead, crouched above in the trees.
Moonlight affords some perspective on the landscape, but nothing you could trust.
It is a theory half believed-in, a way to see how far you could be carried off
if left alone at exactly the right moment.

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