Matthew Bergey, Satyrs Dancers
Charcoal on stonehenge paper
How close the sky must have felt.
Sun spread flat at his feet, shoveling
up sparks that burned small stars
into his skin, making a nest in his
lungs. & how he must have craved
what the gods crave: a brief respite
from fueling the machinery fueling
the wars fueling the intimacies born
of seeing the world for what it is.
How I imagine him flush & fully lit,
like meat glistening from old hooks,
like a constellation tearing into that
greater darkness. As his sky slowly
buckled at the knees. As the clamor
& cry of trains swept strangers no
closer or further from home. Even
as he carried that collapsed heaven
home to us every night in balled up
fists, how I imagine helping shave
off those black bits of lung to hear,
finally, what gods once sang about.