Cronos, which, as it brings an end to all things which have had a beginning,
may be said to devour its own offspring.
– Footnote from Bullfinch’s, The Age of Fable
Baffled by tips of sharpened steel
pointed this way and that by ravening men
a moral and contemplative sap
takes instead wolves as his intimates.
Their wet wolf hair
and old forest smell
dispel his sense of fear and peril.
He guzzles their milk like Romulus.
Has the fool not seen
a bestiary where it’s said that a wolf
cannot spin back its head
just as the Devil will not repent?
The wolf cannot claw his way back
to heaven as lightning only falls.
So his paws rip mutton
from the guileless bones
of dunces searching for truth
and a quiet meadow in the garden.
Like men, wolves too plan for slaughter –
regale each other with the story
of the next mound of flesh
to fill their stomachs like a gift.
Too apathetic to run
and ready to settle now
for platitudes like a tweedy invalid
in the groves of academe
the fool sings a dulcet ballad
that once goosed the heart.
A fragment of bliss which
dissolves like a wisp
between the uninhabitable worlds
of men and animals.
Who now sleeps with his memories
in wrinkled sheets? No one.
So many stillborn dreams
bumble through museums
But not his.
So useless he was they all say.
And so nature and war (like time)
bring an end to all things
which have had a beginning.
The good, the bad and the indifferent.
