thirty

This is the thirtieth short poem about Drastus.
Like many of the other short poems about Drastus,
it is not really very short. I apologize.

The thirtieth short poem about Drastus
prefers the three-line stanza to the more traditional quatrain
because there is just something about the number three.

In the thirtieth short poem about Drastus
it is unlikely that we will determine once and for all
what makes Drastus so much better than all the others,

be they French, Norweigan, Ukranian, Swedes, or Finns.
Is it his gift for a persuasive title?
His hard-won gothic imagery, neither garish nor too subtle?

Too late to say. It was always too late to say.
We have arrived at the thirtieth poem.
There will be no thirty-first.

No book will come to enshrine the thirty short poems in print.
Like their subject, the thirty short poems about Drastus
are temporary things in a world made up of temporary things.

Even the old serpents celebrated by Drastus,
who seem so fearsome
if you really give yourself over to them,

cannot last. Because nothing can. After nature's first green passes
so do the rest of its greens.
They all grey out eventually -

immediately, even, if we take the long view.
The thirtieth short poem about Drastus
rather disingenuously prefers the long view.

When, years from now,
nobody is reading the thirtieth short poem about Drastus
because the planet has been destroyed by poisons in the air

or by nuclear holocaust,
and the computer on which the thirty short poems were written
is less than a wisp of chemical smoke in the low atmosphere,

someone will say:
"Augahthhahahgghkh,"
because he is in terrible pain.

From their place on the unreachable far side of that strangled cry
the thirty short poems will hum riffs to themselves
and protest that they are only trying to help.

Thirty short poems, your apology is insufficient.
Here I take my leave of you
and leave you to

these songs in the shadows,
at whose gates you are finally fit
to arrive.