Poem

We should love the gods who don’t love us, I’m reading in a cone of intimate light beamed on a yellowing page. My father’s old book, packed and shelved unread from town to town, rests on my stomach like an otter floating on its back at the center of a moonbeam crossing a still pond will munch a horned pout propped on its belly. Flipping back, I read how the gods love the good, a noun only known truly to those who’ve clambered into a sunlight of pure reason. Nothing we know is real; even that sun isn’t the real sun. I didn’t get it in college, so long-long-ago and so far-far-away when I marked up a Penguin paperback to pass a test, but now old and sleepless, nagged by the ache in what a cranky gas station guy called the “prostrate” while prescribing zinc, I understand why smarties who think too hard get stupid. My soul will die with me, poof from my cooling meat-unit like perfume swept away in a gust, says the stoic I thumb forward to. Nonetheless, despite no quo for that quid, I should live virtuously and banish desire that only worsens horrors I sweat out in dread wee hours that even an earnest priest called “fell” in spondaic doubt. Only after a dose of dreary Scotus will slumber finally fall. As I drift, possums out in black night will waddle forth to cozy their bellies at yellow lines on asphalt still warm from a vanished sun. Stately deer will slow-strut from thickets in single file to graze lawns spiked by tiny warning flags. In this doze called second sleep all they call “the world” is indeed but the stuff of forms, not stuff at all but vague, noisome dreams that linger but briefly as formless fears, a taste in the mouth, a whiff of sour scent that diffuses into a shaft of sunlight as the corpse I live in wakens. Published in the October 2026 issue: View Contents