for Epimetheus

To a God, what’s potential is most alive.
Re-forming, re-writing scripture,
the possible and the probable writhing
dragon and tiger in the high temples.
That valley of ten-thousand things is alive,
real and so dissolute.

When the treeline finally collapses,
and your idylls expire,
the last thing out of Pandora's pithos
will be the first thing entering a dead man's heart.

Just Hope’s gesture casts the world
in flecks of vermilion on the landscape.
Rodin leads out a bronze burgher’s chin
and in dim and sooty lamp light
we find "The Potato Eaters."

But you remember:
Sheltered in a copse of slowing heartbeats,
after the acrid escape of every ill into existence,
a stunned and foolish girl leaned in to look.