JERRY #7

Jacob A. Bennett

Eudoimonia

Era then for the excavation, an unharnessed spelunk and unlanterned. A clamber along the cave wall, I coat the dark beneath my hands with something sanguinary. But sweeter than blood. Here is good and there is good news. Something for a template opposite of melancholia, something of the ecstasy of sacrifice among the Sybil forbears, before the hierarchy of Religion. A palm print smeared across damp rock says gore, says so take me. A hand reaching from a cloud of dust, settled, turned encrusted, covering up, awaiting the retouch. The first mood of art is surprise; the second recognition; I licked a salt mine once and never forgot the sting.

Even now with the know-how to bend the big clock’s biggest hand, how Athenian of me to defeat myself by choice. How American and I call it fate. Hold, says a choric limitation on the applicability of analogy or supplication: don’t get carried away with the comparison. This is not about the helpless sense, the belly-crawl. But about the facing up, spinning inward with deliberation. Is indecision always the seed of mistake and decision account.