Chiseled

If I could smooth out the numbers
and reverse tempus fugit for one year
would everyone laugh at the lilt and language
of mouths wet with fin de siècle slang?
Would hands grasp for John Donne’s ‘relics’
or snatch back Charon’s copper coins?
Would the self-appointed timekeeper
tsk-tsk the waste of manicured land
wail the loss of delicious icebox plums?
Every stonemason surely knows
every cemetery is Byzantium.

“Nemo enim est tam senex qui se annum non putet posse vivere.”
(No man is so old that he does not think himself able to live another year.)
Cicero, Cato Maior de Senectute, (24)

[RK, 6/28/23]


Corvus brachyrhynchos

a single massive oak tree surrounded by the past
we perch beneath this archetypal tree
and enjoy checkered picnics, stolen kisses,
pleasurable truancy, daydreams, or simple siestas

crows go on without us, leaping limbs,
sharing their polished liquid language
impossible to parse, yet intuitively understood
the harvest, the scythe, the winter’s tale

perched over discarded fast food scraps
toes scratching leftover lichens
from stereotypical polished granite
what goes on without us

“Meliora sunt ea quae natura quam illa quae arte perfecta sunt.”
(Things perfected by nature are better than those finished by art.)
Cicero, De Natura Deorum, (II, 87)

[RK, 6/28/23]