From between the pages
of a nineteen sixty-eight junk store
copy of D’Aulaire’s Norse Gods
and Giants: the five clean-cut crenellate
petals of a flower almost alchemical
in its papery
likeness to what
it was: a sign conspired
to preserve some tremor in an adolescent’s
heart, or round out a phylum in a science
notebook kept for school,
or perhaps, in fear,
to summon the wandering
Valkyries whose muraled lives
are marked for good by the cinnabar
leached off its cells. Now, a dead
metaphor carrying on long
past its paradigm
of human need,
it faces into the future
freed of our small demands on it,
like the exiled Tibetan god-king
blessed with the common sense
to survive himself.
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