Brushes With The Dark Law

 To be published in September, 2025 in Liebestraum Review

A Reckoning

Old Sisyphus sets the table slowly. Guests are a big deal now.
The Librarian is coming for supper.
She’ll bring the history of ideas.
 
It is late in the year and the long reach of the afternoon
so sunlight streams in acute angles through this room --
slow autumn light shines on dust motes rising like tired little angels.
 
Old S is tired too. The only stones he pushes now are in his kidney.
He stays inside for days and follows the shifting light
to see it change the room in endless afternoons; to see time fall.
 
Tonight, though, he’ll meet her to settle effects and their causes.
He will admit to her he can’t keep up at all.
Speed no longer feeds him and these hills are too steep.
 
At the head of this trestle table he’ll place human error.
That’ll be his chair where they’ll negotiate the death they share
and then map how the mortal mind always misses the point.
 
She’ll come at sunset, her arms loaded with scrolls –
long lists of appeals, old stipulations,
a faulty memory, and lives of purpose scribed on parchments.
 
He knows what she’ll ask of him when she comes.
She’ll ask him to free them all from his needy heart’s ache. 
 
*
There in the corner of the dining room wait
papers he’ll show her. The bloodwork from the lab,
under a cucurbit of dried mushrooms and madrone twigs.
 
And the overdue book on Plotinus he promised
to return to her. She’ll forgive him.
She always does. It is her act. A dance of withered figs.
 
Now he hears her hooves scratch at the door.
His best and last offer will be to open it. He takes a breath
to prepare himself for the curse of silence they’ll explore.
 
His wobble shames him. His unbalance bores her. 
Oh his wrinkled cherished hand smooths his hair
then opens the polished door to see her there.
 
*
 
He could ask her to dance,
but he won’t.
 
He could offer drinks from the river of consolation,
but he won’t.
 
So they will hold each other
until they don’t.
 
There is work to do. Even ancient trees live to produce fruit.
They exhaust the light on this longest of nights.
 
Every idea waits for them, patient as blood.
Then she wraps a spell around the philosopher’s stone.
 
She points to where he sits and says, “if this makes you feel special,
dismiss it. Not even your mistakes are real.”
 
He thinks she sounds like his mother, the punishment and calcination.
His origin is in her and what’s left of fire passes from one life
 
to another.  At last they scratch at their saddle of human aspiration
and lie to each other like husband and wife.
 
But it is an accounting, not love, she came for. The books are closed.
The parchments rolled out nothing but dust and mold.
 
This poem, this skin of utterance, is an impermanent fool,
and all fools die, turn to stone, and roll down
 
the mountain. On the peak’s lee side epithets huddle
to pay and purify his delinquent fees. S agrees to these cold terms.
 
So done and signed, she rings the bells.  Work is over.
Now she is his dream to wake from,
 
with a red coal on his tongue.
The new ash will make an earth in his sleep.
And the season of sleep is finally here.