MAGOG

I do not look at the rocks and trees, I am frightened of what they see. — Ted Hughes, "Gog"

Revelation 20: 7–8

    1

    Remember the old ones — absent fathers
    of the blankety blank, of the Olde Tyme abyss —
    scaly fathers, horned and half human?
    Bedtime prayers still vie for their attention,
    but they linger in the gungy bars of Magog.
    They have withdrawn to their game rooms,
    their refuge of churchy Sabbaths, but
    suppose it all remained in their hands:
    unmodified strands of something more
    than elemental. Would we be elevated too?
    We dreamt they loved us; all was clover.
    But we woke to a cough, and the rude birds,
    silky and distant in their aerial world,
    were clearing their throats for no one.


    2

    So our world is remade. What remains, relieved
    of itself, waits tolerantly for the garbagemen.
    We fear no more reusing. We fear the old ones
    will never return, renewed, from their hidey-holes
    beyond the asteroids. Remember when
    the leaves would stir up on the paths
    behind us? Remember when the rocks and trees
    quivered and shared in our adrenaline?
    There was a great togetherness in that.
    Relieved of ourselves, we wait for our collectors.
    O naked, woolly fathers, o mountainsides, o
    nameless rattlers in the wood! Through such
    unexpected doorways they'd loom and startle.
    "Don't move" and [your name here], they'd whisper.


    3

    Their replica tongues would lick the palsy
    into your limbs — remember that? —
    would enter you and cause "that thing"
    to grow, deformed, inside your body. They
    are gone now into their pisscoffins, lip-
    syncing their hoarsest sacre bleu, coughing
    deeply into the beer gardens of Holy Nowhere.
    They've gone shakily into Chronic Fatigue (or
    so they say), and further into Amnesia, into Coma,
    where they travel with the coldness of squid.
    Their universe is never rational. They cannot
    do the math. Instead, they sweep the books
    from the table/forbid the rudimentaries, and
    their absence scuttles, crablike, all around us.


    4

    Now the animal is dead. [Jelly-wobble.] Scabs.
    Nobody knows what it is anymore.
    The head removed, the dark fur matted,
   &