Helios
Some say not only the apple in the mouth of the horse is golden, so is the horse.
Four horses at the head of the chariot drive the sun across the sky.
Back then, the world was encircled in an ocean-stream.
The sun rose and sank in the god’s water.
Water doesn’t burn.
You can’t create energy or destroy it.
Things transform.
And later, the apocalypse.
First, this.
Then, this.
A horse on fire sets the field on fire.
To each empire, a white, red, black or yellow horse.
The last horse will have the yellowy sick pallor of a corpse.
It is a well-known law of nature that men die before animals.
All time in all time past.
Night and day, the horses honeysuckle.
Most of the gold in our body is in our blood.
* * * * *
holy order
The word Messiah comes from the word smear, anointed with oil.
Slime: I follow; literally, I stick to, as opposed to dissolve into, the water.
Linere: to daub, besmear, rub out, erase, as in a demon or disease or evil purged from your body by dousing your head or entire body in milk, butter, fat or oil, sometimes poured straight into the wound to seal it from the sun.
For years, I thought the extreme referred to the ineffable, but, in the end, what the extreme meant was at or very near the point of death.
After all, gold is only one illusion away from god.
Remember the toy thaumatrope?
On one side of the disk, there’s a picture of a bird and on the other, a cage; rub the string between your fingers to see bird, cage, bird, cage, bird, cage, birdcage, cage, bird.
Sometimes, when you look away, you can still see for a moment a thing’s ring.
Be thou my ghost; be thou my grease on the old sheets.
* * * * *
flight
Four horses head the sun across the sky with their burnt-black hair.
Four rivers flow from the River of Paradise.
The first river winds through where the gold is.
There is gold and bdellium and lapis lazuli so blue you could mask your mother in it for burial.
Milk in a bowl looks blue if thinned by water, amber if thickened by honey.
One river flows through Paradise and feeds the fruit and then breaks into four other rivers.
Like the rivers, we know how to get out.
Wash your face in that spit?
Your mouth?
Your neck?
Your hand?
Risky.
Two bowls of milk outside the door.
It’s not a riddle.
You’re not getting back in without begging for more.