by John Zedolik
Pontius’s hands, which he dipped in the basin’s water
must have been pale as the ivory of Pheidias’s Zeus in its dim temple-box,
veinless like a languid limb of Aphrodite lost in a Aegean wreck—
so fish swimming for a moment to splash in the shallow bronze that would not reflect his face,
for otherwise he might have known himself, as Apollo’s oracle at Delphi advised, pagan-wise,
seen his sallow fins, flabby in the flash of liquid habitat, that does not admit a rigid
row of bones necessary to make the straight decision and determined trace
on the dry land sometimes parched, without spirit or rain, to unforgiving rock, adamant terrain.
Commentaires