“The Gods but Dregs”
By Edward Mayes
Faith, if you can believe it, falls something
Like something else falls, like fill in the blanks,
Like it isn’t already loaded, what we’ve all
Thought at one time or another time, while
Sitting in a deck chair, dreaming in a pup
Tent, who really wants to see camouflage
As camouflage and how could we since it
Would cease to be, we would cease to be,
Covered at best in soot, or nidicolous vs.
Nidifugous, or to be a kangaroo with not
One but two uteri, or just when we thought
We could be feeling arteriosclerotic, here
Comes Claudio Monteverdi’s Scherzi
Musicali and we can then say with assurance
Laetatus sum, you with your ciaccona, me with
My passacaglia, a little confusion is good for
The heart, it’s not that Emily never left
The neighborhood alone, it’s that she never
Left the neighborhood alone, and then we
Were stumped whether the Bernard Herrmann
We were listening to was from Obsession or Vertigo—
We knew not from Psycho, with its ostinati in the shower
Scene, the way Scruffy the dog scratches at the door—
Let me in, let me out, let me in, let me out, and since
We don’t smoke anymore, we can’t pretend we can
Blow smoke, camuffare, especially to cover our tracks,
That day we spent in the séance, but came up short,
And it may have been the siege of emotion that made
Us feel truly godless, or was it penniless, empty,
Our miter boxes we kept in our school desks for
The so-called pagan babies, there will never
Be enough, never enough, until there is too much.
Notes:
The title is a line from poem 1642, “A World made penniless by that departure,” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin.
Source: Poetry (November 2020)