Apotheosis

When that light came down
     like in some silent melodrama
You’d never seen but must have imagined,
     (In the same way you imagined being
     swept across the dance floor),
What else did you fabricate?

The frazzled mantle you’d thought to bear
Now to swaddle the accidental child;
Your own failings briefed upon his yet
     unmolded mind – for him the soul
You imagined saving.

He was sickly, meek, mild, had not
Nor ever would have the stamina of a prophet.
But you lay it on him anyway.
Likely, it was too burdensome for you,
But how did you ever think
     the abandoned child would bear it?

Tho’ once yoked, ‘til to the shambles led,
     his onus drives him forth.
He drives the furrow to the end and back,
Stupid, blind and knee-deep in the muck,
     with scoff to both fate and luck.
His yellow eye upon the track before,
     the last line a miasmic stench,
Forward, forward through the mud blood trench.

The caissons drag the tunnel through;
The bends still kill most who dive so deep.
The depths where no light, no matter how divine
Can penetrate; fails to show, cannot shine.

But here a darker ray gleams down
     (or maybe up),
Which may, in its own way, be just as sharp,
     just as illuminating. . .
Against this black beam the frottagery
     produces its shaded lie.

Not light nor dark, the gray aura emanate
     beneath the chromed dome,
That brow plowed by ox and ass,
Squirrely lines no good for planting,
     never was; fallow all these years.

Unproductive; a podless harvest – off to the swine
     – fain would he have eaten such.
And though he could survive on little,
     he would not have minded some ort or other.
But this can wait.

Now the darkness falls, resumes, subsumes;
Brings all the fuzzy flow into sharp contrast,
The flickering insight into nothingness
Which never plumbed to its depthness cast
Gives yet some hold against those last words:

At last.