Classic Poem

The Mastodon's gone
whose eight-ton tread
shook the steppes of the earth;
above whose head
wheeled condors wide as storms,
their necks blood-red.

With them, he is gone
out the gates of ice
and quagmire, to his cold
bed, to fossilize.
In all eternity, none
will now lay eyes

upon his mountainous
haired hump, describe
his mating thunders, his
stance toward the tribe
of men; no priest of Pan
ever imbibe

the groping divinity
that heaved that hulk,
heavy with ivory, forward
out of the black
cone forest and grey muskeg,
snows on his back.

He might have known
something of the power-
and-the-glory, whose withers rose
like the shore
of an iceberg, and whose bones
a billionth year

barely will break. . . .
But, long since, he's
utterly felled . . . . Sometimes it makes
the imagination freeze,
my dears, how unsentimental
God really is.











By permission of the author.