Assuming
that some doughty ancient hero
once managed to steal Cerberus,
the Gatekeeper of Hell,
and leave the Underworld
without its sentinel—
what, if such a theft were ever true,
would have happened then?
Would not Hell have lost
its confining shores and boundaries,
spilling over into our world—without end—
the living falling in, untimely,
without even the courtesy
of a visa stamp for the nether realm,
and the dead pouring outward,
with no one left to bar their escape?
And all—everyone, everything—
would be bemused and mixed again,
as in the Ionian fragments
of the world’s origins,
from that Dark Age before Socrates.
Or did someone strip Anubis
of his canine head?
Or was it that same reckless child
who made his mother lose her own
and set upon her neck
the head of a village cow?
Or was it a friend, a brother,
who dared such impious exchange?
And if Eros were in truth
the Lord of All Boundaries,
what of Heaven and what of Hell
would a headless Desire
wreak—or wreck—or remake?
And wasn’t this the unsaid point
still pondered by Mary Magdalene
in her cavern, darkened with vigil—
as she contemplates her skull,
a remnant surely not merely of a dead man
but of one decapitated—
a life severed at its limit?
And if today so much of humankind
longs for dogs and cats in their homes,
isn’t that—yet unbeknownst to us—
a rising pre-motion of premonition
that we may need to grow back
the heads of those long-lost guardians
of the deep and the dead,
those who can tell and scent
what evil is and how it smells,
even when unseen?
teach us again
what we forgot to remember,
what we learned—fatally—to miss?
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