by Tim J. Myers.
I’ve slipped away from suburbs and irrigated fields,
spelunking the vaporous fissure in which
blue river is snapped away forever–
and now I travel descending hollowed rock-bowels
to Hela’s kingdom–
have abandoned the world of blue and yellow light
where they pound out Christmas carols
on a sour piano at the old folks’ home,
where the silent poor flutter always, moths
about golden lamps, where children are beaten
till their eyes go blank as unminted coins–
have cloaked myself in darkness, fixing its folds
around me with a brooch of cold metal,
always going deeper. Is this
a river before me, or merely a coursing of sand?
A sickly light rumors itself here,
ice-cave dim, rotting-log luminous.
Of course I am lost.
The sun, a cauldron boiling over–
I turned my back. Baldur is here,
somewhere in these pressing vacuous reaches
to even slightest melody or utterance impenetrable,
whole oceans expiring into
this one Silence.
I imagine him breathing with great labor.
He has forgotten the sky, sits white-faced
beside the empty stiffness of his woman,
Nanna’s beauty banked low, even her bright pupils
grown sluggish. Hela commands them both,
says nothing, frozen cataract from whom
not a single lively drop goes splashing.
High above me in the human world,
electric chairs like votive lights;
dark herds of the broken-hearted
sucking anxiously at vein-nectars;
even saints befuddled, wondering at
their own prohibitions. Baldur may be
ten thousand miles from where I stand,
but his silence reaches; it would shame
a snow-buried mountain range.
We haven’t managed to isolate the dark gene,
can’t sing the music of the cyclotron.
Enlightened legislation is still pending;
the image of the quasar will not
unblur itself in our great telescopes.
But Baldur has wrapped all his great divinity
around the one tiny ember still
burning at his unimagined core. He is not
extinguished.
I must find him, lay my head on his holy feet.