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Prometheus

What do I do with the key
to this city, this door to you
that never opened fully?
-Lorna Dee Cervantes

for Preston

The white egg of moon held too tight,
thin breadth of birch, shiftless tigereye,
this is how you gave me to Athena.
Not standing upright, not with a daffodil
of flame. No, you cast me a child
of the sea -- a jellyfish, a broken clam.
You rounded my angles, softened
the staccato of my speech.
Broke into all my vases trying to free
the black-headed dragonfly of hope,
I closed the lid too quickly upon.

And while I gathered the buzzing heads
of despair and disillusion, and broke them
under my heel, you, in your reckless humanity,
banished yourself to the cold, flat Dakotas
where neither prophecy nor heroics could reclaim you.
And so I am left haunted with your creations; the ghosts
who made rice in your kitchen now come
to braid my stubborn hair. The dark-haired angels
do not pace on the roof but break windows
and pilfer my wallet and jewelry.

Here, in my hills,
I long for your shaken down sun,
your water and stone.
But instead you have become
the broken wings of time, July
firecrackers, a shoelace untied.
If only you would return,
I would give up the perennial of my words,
and then all that would remain is this eagle
on my fingertips,
that I have promised to kill.

Erin Elizabeth

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