Poem: ‘Setebos Upon Caliban’
Wait — which one are you? One of mine?
Hard to keep track of you all. You are so small,
small beyond small.
There are gods who go in for microscopy
peering through their divine lens-tubes, adjusting the focus,
following all the infinitestimality of your Earthly lives.
Making notes. Not me.
Praying, are you? Rare that a prayer encroaches,
Taps my lunar wilderness, chants that distance
Upascends here, to my airless black church
Anthracite god-house
Throned in dun wasteland among pockmarked rocks,
tarmac tundra, liquorice stalactites of frozen motor-oil
dusty dust, dust that smells like gunpowder
all of it my realm.
Not, though, cold all the time as you seem to think.
Half the month the sun lays us on the griddle
bakes and scorches the passive airless basalt
crushing the hot dust
then a fortnight freezing parching cold,
and the whole wheel fortunes round again.
It gives me, I suppose, a twotone personality:
boilingly cold, cold.
Indifference makes no difference to me: I watch
I don’t watch you, and couldn’t care less. But I watch.
I see clouds sweeping their baleen grids of rain
grazing your world, filtering out the dry. I see
the meerschaum smoke-puffs of volcanoes,
the shimmerlines of continental tidal coasts,
the scythe of dusk’s line harvesting the light at sunset
and the gleaner’s hook of dawn’s line
scooping up the darkness. That’s what I watch.
I see whole earth, a blue pond scummed green
and foamed white with chemical effluence —
that is enough for me.
I cannot not see — Earth’s fixed
like Prometheus pinned to a brute black mountainside
It cannot be escaped. And so I watch it.
As for you — calibanicule, calibatom, a dot upon a speck
within a miniature cell of water too small to notice:
I do not see you at all. This is the meaning of God Invisible —
not that I am, but that you are.
— — — — — — — — — — — — So pray away
launch words into the lacquered ceiling of vacuum.
Or don’t. I could care less. There are gods
eager to take your credit-card details for chat,
if that’s your thing. Not me. Not Setebos.
This my revelation, offered upon tablets of moonrock:
Understanding that nothing changes changes everything.
