The dog in the fable barked at the moon.
Its paw prints ended half way over the snow,
a mile in a forest equal to a moment in the past.
That night the stars threw away our wishes
and the first winter came into being.
Downwind from a city of wood
the dog in the fable growled at the wind,
its voice carrying over the starlit drifts,
over the frozen rivers of the northern bounds.
It was the song of the wolf, and ancient.
It was an aria of lamentation.
Centuries swept through the night-coloured trees.
Far away, in a palace of ice,
a fool persisted with his folly.
Wines of Power
Finally, the gods were reduced to the odd bit of glare,
to silhouettes and shadows, to a few fading and distant jeers.
And so light, a single pharaoh ant could lift them.
They’ve lain down with the straw, becoming golden stalks.
They reside in funnel webs. In a convergence of ditches.
They are self-detained, a light-beam their prison.
Now when the gods are angry only the crickets may listen.
The ages forge new paths, the gods senile and forgetting.
They think in hallucinations, their tired-out idylls in tatters.
They dress in the camouflage of stillborn human emotions,
shod in slippers sewn from centuries of unforgiving debasement,
a patina of lichen and moss substituting for a god’s skin,
chimera-dust chirping in their hair-pieces.
Of course they pine for the occasional phantasmagoria.
Of course they miss the black wines of power.
That’s what their despair is, this winter chill in the air.
Time is playing their god-bones like broken instruments.
No longer are we at the whim of the gods’ laughter.
The stars blow through them like poems made of wind.
Bionote
Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His latest book, 'Boxing In The Bone Orchard' is available now via Frontenac House. https://www.frontenachouse.com/product/boxing-in-the-bone-orchard/
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