Somewhere, Half Way

Somewhere, Half Way JESSE MCKNIGHT Like a camel and his driver captured In bas-relief forever, give or take A day, on the lee wall of a mountain Gorge hiding from the stern gaze of the sun And dispensing shadows like a bishop Over the cobblestone road to Petra, To the Treasury where King Gottrocks of The Nabataeans leased his digs for a Two hour episode to the last crusade, The lost crusade, where Indiana cracked His last whip and disappeared in a dust Devil and where the great dead, forgotten For eons, now bask in celebrities Of granite and marble, the hard won wall Carvings of my reason for existing Have been rubbed raw by the winds and sands, the Floods of occurrence and only a few— The apprised, the blessed or the astutely Discerning—can descry the perfectly Delineated hump, the delicate Cadence of what was once a caravan In motion, the blank long face of him who Waits, slackened tether faintly of hand, and The stone shoes as all that remains, in brief, Of what was chiseled and shaped and polished To last forever. No reason to go On or believe is reason enough, the Fading memory of a lifelong God Of absence and abdication, whose last Words were “I’ll be right back,” the only God. C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 27 ...