Skandalon: Poems

Skandalon

71 S k a n da lon Plumed gods have their own agendas, and fly where they will at whatever speed they choose, being gods, being plumed, and strike the earthly air as they choose, being choosers and not the chosen; but choosing can be their weakness, the chink in the godly adamantine, not quite so open as the term “Achilles heel” connotes—demigods being oddball hybrids—but real enough. And so when this god, pimped out in his serpent form— for the benefit, one supposes, of the masses—chose to turn and see: not to treat the human world as a slum of mortality, beneath his notice but actually to look, it was his undoing; and what did the priest on his pyramid offer that so distracted an Eternal? The usual: a sacrifice, but one so exquisite that even the cruel god was dazzled: on the altar above its pit of acidic flame a single butterfly, glamoured, etherized, then meticulously dismembered, as the rapt god watched, with a knife of priestly obsidian itself shaped like a butterfly, the priest wielding not only the knife but a lifetime of disciplined skill, and love for the god, and love for the butterfly, and a body odor so acrid it made the priestly donkeys and all the gathered virgins retch— but gods are beyond that, their contempt for humankind is so refined that anything of the body escapes them, which is what the priest knew as he carved his monarch’s wings in a series of hierophantic gestures that appeared to be an efficacious magic of indeterminate kind—so the god thought, for gods always think that way—but in fact were nothing but a signal to his hidden assistants: and so when the trap was sprung the god was disempowered by a godly wonder of his own devising And was turned, on a plinth of quartz, in one shrewd human stroke, into this stone being you see before you now, my children, one eye still gazing at the deconstructed butterfly which now is millennia turned to dust, and the other eye, a perfect study in godly outrage, still fixed on your hungry hearts, my children, hating each of you with a godly passion, and waiting, waiting forever if necessary, for that hatred’s unveiling. ...