On Ends, Follies, Ascension

Lucca Daniel Green  
19 February 2018

	Ahead now so near, a shipwrecking fall looms in his ears
	from set atop that deck ever clearer to view, horrible now,
	unignorable now for the rush of a swift current’s oblivion.
	Yet he delays, wondering, stay aboard trusting Icarian moulds,
	or abandon this hull at the risk of a drowning beneath?
	Too close to the precipice now for new-postured tones,
	and still no third way, he mourns, no chariot of Helios
	to Kekrops’ feet and the merciful aide of his host assembled.
	“Ah! A dream! A fancy of rosy-eyed children buried and wept.
	 Heedless, you fool, who saw courses unbusied by ships,
	 who thought it a way free from toilsome, mindless labor.”
	Now, as a lamb lone-wandering over half-barren rock
	tumbles to doom, the sating spoil of ravenous packs, and
	as a lion’s trunk drops beneath an elephant-footed stomp
	and his brain enriches the sands victim to crushing might,
	as pebbles sent clattering over the edge, scattered by toes
	testing ever new ways along moonlit mountainsides,
	so too is his vessel doomed, aged with bright-painted planks
	rotting within, to drop from a ledge to river-battered rocks
	whose protests roar ‘round echoing ravines; so he too, its guide,
	should give one final reverberating shriek heard by trees alone,
	those pitiless stewards without motion or reach to catch hold
	of a body free-falling to demise in current-courses below.

	To which of the sky-tending supreme is he to appeal, whose hand
	has guided out paths less trod, whose eyes have held measures
	of truth and meaning, signifying vagaries sure-sighted?
	“To the ecstasy, dear one, of pens and paper,” nine voices call
	  cloaked in covering mist, “to peoples nourished in the flow of ink,
	  to turns of phrase and careful parsing: write for us, dear one.
	  Let us bestow song, our love, and set yourself true in our record.”

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