Читать книгу By the Numbers - James Richardson - Страница 14

Iron Age

Lest he could not make out my name tag,

I signed that I was a god, and would eat.

He brought me, as was meet, utensils,

but served, Lycaon, pans of scorn: sauté

of which of the human muscles I won’t say.

No problem. Nothing I had not imagined

as vividly as its happening. Whereas a man

concocts strange sauces for his cruelty

that he may forget what meat he feasts on:

thinner and thinner his wife, his pale subjects,

his guests, ghost-thin, and at last,

in anesthetic dark, painlessly he tooths

the sweet flesh from the bones of his own hand.

All this I knew, without what you call horror,

but since he meant to horrify, I chose anger,

and thereafter, it is true, he was a wolf.

All one to me were his turns and swervings,

confession, lies, indifference, remorse.

Say that I showed him heavily how I saw him

from above: no wanderer but a map, unmoving.

Though a man thinks he can hide in changes.