The air had been sprayed with the stiff sheen
of daybreak: a curtain fluttering; a window gone dim.
Not that the gods wanted it this way.
Their tent was cold, too. They knelt on the gravel
pondering the sky from which they long ago fell.
Who would carry the foul fumes away?
I kept an apple for Mother but ate the charred skins.
Comes a horseman, lazy on his mount,
helmeted in steel, rising from the pitted field.
The gods are not well braced. Their sleeves are
tattered and their flaring rockets
lie disabled by vandals.
Delay is all; all matrimony, plasma,
tokens of esteem, all vows exchanged in the cold heavens ...
The law is coming, three battered islands hence;
the splash is coming, the radar is coming, the law
is coming wearing Mother's private wig.
Comes a horseman, steady on the climb, a blade
against his thigh, a rumor on his spine.
A pencil in his glove and a shovel in his soul
and big plans for a secret farm: comes a horseman.
---Mark Levine
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