Finally, the gods were reduced to the odd bit of glare,
to silhouettes and shadows, to a few fading and distant jeers.
And so light, a single pharaoh ant could lift or shift them.

They’ve lain down with the hay, becoming golden stalks.
They reside in funnel webs. In a convergence of ditches.
They are self-detained, a light-beam their prison.
Now when the gods are angry only the crickets may listen.

The ages forge new paths, the gods senile and forgetting.
They think in hallucinations, the old idylls in tatters.
They dress in the camouflage of stillborn human emotions,
shod in slippers sewn from centuries of unforgiving debasement,
a patina of lichen and moss substituting for a god’s skin,
chimera-dust chirping in their hair-pieces.

Of course they pine for the occasional phantasmagoria.
Of course they miss the black wines of power.
That’s what their despair is, this winter chill in the air.
Time is playing their god-bones like broken instruments.
No longer are we at the whim of the gods’ laughter.
The stars blow through them like poems made of wind.