Lucifer

1. In wandering mazes lost

I was a father once who watched his boy
fashion from his building blocks whole temples,
increase the burial mound of a chieftain of straw
into ziggurat, skip from pyramid to corporate tower

and like miracles incarnate master grids and mirrors
that rose above a Lego-litter in the play-den
and our little builder unaware of that first motive:
just to keep the jackals off the chieftain’s corpse.

I shattered one, refusing to follow this with a moral
and thought promiscuously about DeSade’s remark
how greater innocence brought double pleasure
in its bruising. Or was this schadenfreude?

Did I not describe the complex in some journal article
to create afflictions that demanded cures of money,
all those green or gold-plastered poultices? Surely
it’s on microfiche, and in its narrow field, famous,

as memory is long, too long, or art is long or short,
depending on one’s pleasure. (As bumper stickers tell:
commit random senseless acts of--.) That afternoon
I rambled, kicked backyard leaves, read philosophy, plotted.



2. Satan & Sin, Not Satan & Son

Dark continent, place I can’t reach: daughter
I don’t understand. Her double-coiled hair
looks, oddly enough, like horns of a cuckold,
or are they the induction coils for thunder,
and what will thunder say? Let’s hope
it proclaims an anger vaguely dispersed
and enfeebled, spread across a tepid sea
to look more beautiful, pearly or pink.
Ages apart, we seldom talk. But never
does she raise the question of mother.
Her boyfriends feature body piercings and tattoos.
New metal I don’t understand, chains timeless.

Milton got it wrong alright: when was I ever
squat like a toad? More like a chimpanzee
I watched the first couple in congress.
Pods of something like milkweed
and curly shoots broke under me, and oozed.
How I envied their fumbling incompletion.
How miserably complete I had become,
this assigned address an Alpharetta parking-lot,
from which our house architect, Mulciber,
molded magnificence, from pitch alone.
They even played with it, my underlings.

3.

How simpler to snap together labor camps or prisons,
supermarkets or university systems for Silicon valleys.
How much harder architect Mulciber’s craft, rococo

fashioned from all that Midas would have fled from
for whom nothing ever turned to shit, his life not stalled.
Tears come to my eyes when I think, and freeze.