the carcass of a mammoth, scouring it with wind
so that even trade ships could see it from afar.
Seeking shells, a village boy found it first,
believing the ribs curling up in early fog to be

an ancient galleon, perhaps even the Argo itself
levered by Poseidon from the sea bottom and nibbled
by years of urchin to a cage of white wood. Combing onto
the beach, the clans of village surrounded the find with smoke

and sacrifice. By noon they declared it Ajax. It could not
be debated, for the bones were legend-sized as those of a
Titan, that god-bold race killed by Zeus in the Gigantomachy,
their charred forms still smoking on the plains of Arcadia.

One kneecap of Ajax was the size of a pentathalon discus.
What must have been gullet, filled with dead sea minikin,
would allow a guzzling of seven amphora, the club of jaw
big enough to chew a bushel of almonds at once,

or bite a man's head from his body. Pausanias, a Roman
geographer, lunching beneath the Lion Gate of Mycenae,
was summoned; word sent by him to the Emperor Hadrian
who arrived by fleet to pay homage. Fearing the bones

might encrust with new flesh to begin a second
Gigantomachy against Rome, Hadrian honored
the fallen mammoth with ceremony and gilded tomb
till Zeus, unable to summon his bolts, took form

as a swan of shallow grief, raining into the Aegean.

Anyone Can Be A Nomad

My face turns up to avoid you,
the moon coming down in bricks
and you dosing our need to
oppose before we can attract.
A few seconds of walk towards me--
arms waving, the chumming begins.
With your hands you align my head
till the relic man is a halo,
and you step back to observe,
all resistance mimicry.
Now a pagan lith below a planet
my lips nibble craters where your eyes are,
sip from an old gully of moon water.
I sicken of ontology and wonder fever
till your nipples pierce my cornea
and brand my forebrain: ordo vigilante.
The language we use is not a virus,
only a primal task of assumption and hormone.
When my turn comes, I ask you to perform.
You revert to a Czar Nicholas daughter
tending her pea garden of captivity,
coloring the earth red with hair.
We are causation and I am reflex.
You ask me to genuflect. I spell no.
My finger then portions the air like Keeotah,
tracing for you between the stars
a new constellation of frog with lute.

In Memory of Romanian Dictators

Pampered from cradle to pedestal,
we rifle like wind through bamboo,
and we are dry. Our faces strain to mimic
those of the great lords of iron and radiation.

Our display of jackboots,
Praetorian appointment memos,
and presence chambers were enough
to force even Gogol to shiver before us.

Thousands labored in the mountain quarries
of eastern Europe to scaffold our claim.
Thousands more cuddled us.
Our noses carapaced out to stadium domes,

our mouths watered to moats, our eyes
sticky as gravity and dead on revolution.
What once was, will always be again.
However, we regret we cannot pause,

only give advice:

Seek not.
Be your own jury.
Name a comet after yourself.

 Michael

 Neff