Now I shall tell of things that change, new being
Out of old: since you, O Gods, created
Mutable arts and gifts, give me the voice
To tell the shifting story of the world
From the beginning to the present hour.
Ovid, The Metamorphoses
I come into being age after age.
Bhagavad Gita
It was a beast the Greeks thought up—
on the side of the terra-cotta vase
a lion charges, roaring fire while
the head of a goat,
grafted onto the center of his back
gazes amiably
at the landscape the lion leaves behind.
Wattles dangle like long lobes from his neck,
swaying, as if he is nibbling
the brittle and edible field of dead wheat
he sees through his small, sideways eyes.
His jaws masticate from side to side
like my grandmother
when she’d lost some of her teeth
so as to make use
of her remaining molars,
while she told us what the world
was like before TV, before radio
before the goat rode
borne forward
in the side-saddle of hind-sight.
: :
Just then, out of the beast’s back
another implausible part of the poem rises:
Once there was a lion
laying alone in a field
in the heat of a singular sun
in a silence no one thought to speak of
in the experience before an after-thought
and he sees a goat standing there
gazing into the distance
as his mouth masticates grasses on its own
his hind round,
tooth white the white of his shag,
the crescents of his horns daintily tapered,
and the lion’s tail twitches just once before he leaps.
The goat, not looking at anything in particular,
his mind is as simple as a stone.
As the lion digests
we walk home.
We are children of eight, ten, twelve just then
as the lion lays back down.
This time it is the lion who does not know
what will soon emerge from his back,
but as for us, the day is so hot
toys have been left out on the lawns,
the cul-de-sacs are empty
and the rain bird sprinklers are scooting shoots of water in arcs
as if in evidence.
The smog alert flag still hangs grey over the playground,
and we envy the cars,
each one enclosing its own capsule of cool air kept firm,
and as we turn the corner
we enter under
the trees where the shade lets in
less light,
so my squint softens, and my eyes
wander as they widen
into the world enlarged by the places my eyes rest.
Because I am so near the ground
I bend to the scent
of some flower, its stamen and pistils splayed,
its petals imprinted with grit
and transparent there
in the eye of the scar—
there is nothing outside this scent
in the heat, and the thought of ice, and it is as if
we stay here
long after we have grown and left.
The desert remains a desert
long after it is planted with groves
and the rows of orange groves become lawns
unrolled in the desert.
And the lion roams and roars fire
with the goat bouncing on his back
as the children walk
and I sit at a desk in the cumulus clouds
above them,
positioned in the instance of departure
as if from a shuttle, hovering.
My hand mated with the mouse,
the point of my finger clicks
my way down
until I am at the corner
where we would make the turn—
I am not there but there is the street.
It looks the same, but shadows have been
averaged out through the use of views;
here is where we’d turn,
up ahead will be the avocado tree the dogs would run to
and there it is.
The town appears empty,
no one out walking
as if Gene Roddenberry is about to come down
from the stars to speak
of the one man, up ahead,
his face erased.
: :
But I forgot to mention the beast’s tail,
so will pause,
which I can now do readily on all my devices,
to say as an act of hindsight:
it was a snake.
The snake whips itself back and forth
as if to make the background see
what could be,
what could have been coming.
: :
I want to make sure you know
my grandmother would not mind
the line about the goat.
As proof, I’ll offer this:
when my sister and I were of the age
when we lived in the nearness of near sight
and near sights loomed like landscapes before us
we stood admiring the long range
of her tan arm,
the surface of it shining and crackled
and when we told her
her skin looked like a roasted turkey
she laughed, her eyes warmed
with the mirth
of a spirit witnessing
the erosion
of minerals off a surface
while within, there is a self
that was once
plump and precise
as a succulent’s singular and central flower.
The wedges of its petals emerge
almost as slow as stillness
in the noon sun.
: :
As the goat grows out of the lion’s back
they, she, it, learn speech
it remember what once was,
and it say, posturing a moment
as if sitting for a portrait,
“It is not now as it hath been of yore;—“
And as we, they, the children, walk home,
we, they, slowly lose our shoes.
Their feet thicken with callous,
gorse and thorn
grow from them
toes tufted,
and burls flower from their bones.
They smell everything;
they want water
we recline in our minds
from the clouds of what they could not predict.
© Diana Fisher