On your stroll through the pantheon you hear nothing.
Sometimes you can make it out in your sleep –
that commingling of the heavenly and human,
unintermitted since the first antiquity.
Is this something the kids should see – Eros
crouching there in the corner with an erection?
Who knows what havoc they wreak when the lights are out –
the people gone, the inscriptions effaced.
It’s an odd sort of existence, that of the gods,
composedly going to and coming from life –
to and from what must seem to them like life.
Maybe it’s like that for the deceased among us,
who similarly fill the imagination
as if no smaller space might contain them
or inscribe the record of their effacement.
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