Moriah

Last night standing at the door
I saw Apollo, knife in hand
standing over the body
of a satyr, skinned because music
to such a god, like holy land, 
is a zero sum begging us to take steel
to body until every woolen sound
played in blood bristled to doorpost.

He will make a desert of another’s olive grove
and planting a bomb shelter, make it bloom.
He will feed his family from the carcass
of a lion, no longer able to tell the truth
of whose combs are whose. 

Later he will sit beneath his fig tree
fingers brushing the coarse fur.
When he rises up he, in the corner of his eye
he will catch his shadow and ask: Esau? 
When he lies down again
he will grasp ankle bone and dream 
he hears again the double flute of night
and long to feel tine, closer than a twin,
budding from the crown of his head.

Last night, standing at the door
I saw Yaakov in a field strewn 
with limbs, left hand clutching
his brother’s pelt close, 
and with his right hand
leading his daughter Iphigenia,
as did his grandfather before him,
to a never-dry stone.

There was no thicket in sight.