Rumination at the Rodeo

 

The eventual outcome of boyhood games,

a flame, not in the mind, but beside,

cast damp light on harmonies

laborious and deadly…

 

And an initial draft, hatched

shallow in a cave in France

cracked the first fissures

in the glacial brain. 

 

Or was it the scratching —

out in the open Sahara —

of senile sandstone, shifting

stronghold of the ochre-clad

 

crocodile? Bull, babirusa

(Sulawesi contends also)

reposed on royal walls,

content in their ancient muscle

 

and the praise of Cro-Magnon

drawn out over generations,

when the rovers of Mars lurked

still as calories in mammoth marrow.

​

None of this now flatters,

the brain and the beast

degrading one another’s passing-

marks on the exam of time. 

 

Yesterday, I heard

the chords of the crowd

chant the alias of a steer

writhing beneath an Oklahoman,

 

and panned a lukewarm dairy farm

among the vessels of Wisconsin.

Today, I saw hope hung

in the halls of El Reina.

 

Picasso, Dali, Magritte —

restorers of aurochian purpose.

Guernica presiding over

its domain of drywall,

 

grandly basking in reactive intellect

and labyrinthine themes.

Yet in the gallery next door,

a Rothko made me lurch again

 

from its gross posse

and lack of fluency.

Duped by synaptic chiaroscuro,

herds are limited now

 

in their visiting hours.

Someday will I also be

guilty of smearing the limestone

with my breath until it blackens?