as old Tiresius shakes his head in time to my
smoke signals. He is stooped now, the husk of a man.
Though the white globes in his head stare deadfast at the sky,
No longer do they see what my ice-blue orbs have hurt.
"What did you tell her?" He asks me, hand gripping his thigh.
"What I tell them all," I smirk, eyeing gold leaves in dirt.
No nod of assent, no searching stare from opaque eye,
only dust and dust, say the leaves on yellow-gold dirt.
We have passed the picnic tables, Grecian in repose;
unrealer now that the noonday sun has risen high
in hypocrite light, when darkness, smiling, sheds its clothes.
"Oaths have been broken," intones the ancient, wizened bat.
"And what would you have me do, O He Who Watches All?"
He has no reply, only mystic mumbled dooms and
"Venom from gilded fangs" and lovely, white, opaque eyes.
What purpose does age serve, when youth is young and alive?
"I'll pluck my own apples!" Laughs my crowd of opaque I's;
We are too old for him, we see what the blind cannot.
"A lie for an apple is nothing more than a lie!"
Truth for both, though neither can see what the other got.
His head is a tomb, where mine a bloody battlefield;
splendor and romance, but no sorry death when I die.
Every bite is a conquest, my weapon and my shield;
Juice drips from a thousand swords, stains sticky hands and feet,
pounded into mud in the same rich dirt where we kneeled;
happy hurts in furious bursts when blood is what I eat.
"Well, what will you tell my daughter?" He is scared, I know.
Vicious brute! scream old white eyes; so ruined, so naive.
I burble, laughing gaily, my bright blue eyes aglow:
"You know the words- better than me or any other-
She'll hear what we tell them all, and while she's on her knees,
you'll know that I told her just what you told our mother."