A prose poem to be published November, 2024 in Unlikely Stories
Sisyphus Invents Justice
Chill dawn breaks a
wound in the sky. We wake where the harbor stopped us. Here a dark sea fills barks of air
with salt and sharpened steel. We wake from one sleep to another.
There’s no
breakfast for us: the empty iron plate is
a last meal. Creosote and gull shit; blisters on our hands. We’ve no rope left
to lift the life we did not plan. That life was a dangerous blade made of our
minds. Greyed stone grown in us, of us, has cooled to the touch. We reach up to it… from this, the tidal trough.
But Providence panders again— we will not last this one and final day.
Yesterday’s labor
emptied us and we fell at night spent on the moldy straw mulled between
warehouses on the wharves; we fall off with splinters. We, the army of hills;
anabasis again, rolling rocks from the shore. We were convicted of the crime of
life. It’s winter; we make our jury of just
gods, paid subscribers all, recruited from hinterlands with jade and blood
sports. We named them so
they could name us.
But the labor’s
lost. The misdemeanors broke their rock all day. We felons pushed ours up the
mountain of our crimes. And there at the summit the setting sun swallowed us. Even
imagined prisoners need rest. The body has limits; bones obey the dark law. We fell back to this ancient port.
Tonight will plug
cotton in the nostrils and lay a copper coin on each eye. So best to stop arguing the case – bloody handprints
dry on the cruel rock. The evidence accrues. Punishments hew to the lunatic propensity
to name things and our reprieve loses itself in moons.
Too late in our
day: we’ve been condemned to the guillotine. So our every step up the stairs
is pristine awareness, our head positioned just so is luminescent attention, our
eye contact with the executioner is sweetly empathetic -- we know how hard his
job is. It’s just the water our gaze
tells him & just let it all roll downhill
If he does his job
our hands won’t need to push the stone ever again. They only need to catch our
head now, tumbling freely in the air, dropping further into mystery, losing
names as it falls. The day falls too, down the hill, back to shore, a withered
moment stumbles and struts –gravity smirks and wants more. More of the sea washing
on these old pilings -- a shelter of human sadness that’s become our scaffold
to climb. Now, this morning on the pier, exhausted from breathing, we muster with
pebbles in our pockets waiting for our slavery to be sold. We expected
reprieves – that’s not how it works.
We want to choose
another myth. We want to execute the plan. We learn the plan is our execution. We
look up to the hills – the help is empty
and a feather is carried out on the tide. We wait between land and sea, day and
night; we wait for the sharp edge
at the end of gravity
to render
justice.
at the end of gravity
to render
justice.
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