Prometheus
When a blunt nub, that five thousand years hence
would be deemed the oldest tree yet living
and named Prometheus by a student
back when schools still taught useless old stories
perhaps because Titans were big and old
or maybe because livers regenerate,
was pushing aside dusty debris to be seen
by only a few human animals who ate
other things so it just grew, imperceptibly,
seeing nothing itself, in that desert place
called Nevada by current humans whose casino
cities glitter for considerable distances,
growing only imperceptibly closer as they drive
through vast black emptiness toward them
with ever-mounting impatience of a sort
flora, and much fauna, for that matter,
don’t seem to feel, like the yet-to-be-named
tree couldn’t, of course, in its sprout-hood
imagine another student sawing it down
to measure its rings for his graduate thesis,
unknowing and quite certainly uncaring
that the circumcenter he counted rings from
marked a moment when the prophet
Calchas was advising Agamemnon to appease
the goddess Artemis by killing Iphigenia,
and I suppose it’s a fair question to ask
how I know this—it’s so because I say so
in this discrete box of words packed as tight
as buzzy atoms, though yes, if you let your mind
wander outside the lines it will all diffuse
like each discrete croak in the rasping chatter
of perching magpies had its moment
in hot silent air and then were as if they never
were said, but as with Herodotus, Homer
and all them, so as good for me too,
for maybe Heracles did free Prometheus
like Hesiod said he did, the real one, that is,
not the tree the student named a name
you’d give a dog, as in “It must be your smell;
Prometheus never bit anyone before,” or
like the parakeet named Cheops who fluttered
happily about the house until the cat, Xantippe,
pinned him under her paws and he just sat
on his swing in his cage after that, without talking
or warbling anymore and died of grief,
knowing finally the true nature of things,
the pitiless consequences of innocence
that even immortal Prometheus
came to suffer for his un-thanked-for gift,
like we imagine the old pine tree’s trunk
twisted in tortured gnarls and its branches
gesticulating in bent agony at relentlessly blue sky
as human misery, and red-beaded pushpins
that constellate the slice of tree, each denoting
how fat the tree was when some miracle
or folly in old stories with outdated dates
happened as horrors or joys the tree
failed to witness, so absorbed in its own skin
upon skin making ring after ring, and who cares
where cones might or might not release
their seeds upon such barren land?
would be deemed the oldest tree yet living
and named Prometheus by a student
back when schools still taught useless old stories
perhaps because Titans were big and old
or maybe because livers regenerate,
was pushing aside dusty debris to be seen
by only a few human animals who ate
other things so it just grew, imperceptibly,
seeing nothing itself, in that desert place
called Nevada by current humans whose casino
cities glitter for considerable distances,
growing only imperceptibly closer as they drive
through vast black emptiness toward them
with ever-mounting impatience of a sort
flora, and much fauna, for that matter,
don’t seem to feel, like the yet-to-be-named
tree couldn’t, of course, in its sprout-hood
imagine another student sawing it down
to measure its rings for his graduate thesis,
unknowing and quite certainly uncaring
that the circumcenter he counted rings from
marked a moment when the prophet
Calchas was advising Agamemnon to appease
the goddess Artemis by killing Iphigenia,
and I suppose it’s a fair question to ask
how I know this—it’s so because I say so
in this discrete box of words packed as tight
as buzzy atoms, though yes, if you let your mind
wander outside the lines it will all diffuse
like each discrete croak in the rasping chatter
of perching magpies had its moment
in hot silent air and then were as if they never
were said, but as with Herodotus, Homer
and all them, so as good for me too,
for maybe Heracles did free Prometheus
like Hesiod said he did, the real one, that is,
not the tree the student named a name
you’d give a dog, as in “It must be your smell;
Prometheus never bit anyone before,” or
like the parakeet named Cheops who fluttered
happily about the house until the cat, Xantippe,
pinned him under her paws and he just sat
on his swing in his cage after that, without talking
or warbling anymore and died of grief,
knowing finally the true nature of things,
the pitiless consequences of innocence
that even immortal Prometheus
came to suffer for his un-thanked-for gift,
like we imagine the old pine tree’s trunk
twisted in tortured gnarls and its branches
gesticulating in bent agony at relentlessly blue sky
as human misery, and red-beaded pushpins
that constellate the slice of tree, each denoting
how fat the tree was when some miracle
or folly in old stories with outdated dates
happened as horrors or joys the tree
failed to witness, so absorbed in its own skin
upon skin making ring after ring, and who cares
where cones might or might not release
their seeds upon such barren land?
