Hierapolis

Gravity crushes gas to light,
And then it swallows back the light.
Mornings when you rise in the dark
And leave all the household lights out,
Color leaches slowly into the courtyard
Of your awareness through animal eyes.

Ploutonion, all shrines to gravity,
The mystery of what falls to what,
The weakest glue, the darkest love.
What can you enjoy right now, what
Is enjoyable about this now? Sparrow,
Don’t fly into that mouth. The bull died,
A sacrifice in an instant. You’ll fall.

How do the priests survive as you die?
They stand tall, as far out from the core
Of this world as they can manage, while
You keep your nose to the lethal ground.
The legendary breath of Cerebus flows
And pools by the entrance to the fault,
The fault itself in the crust, the crust torn
And shifted constantly by the magma,
The magma clinging to the magnetic core,
The iron core a tiny bead whizzing
Billions of iterations around its true love
The local bull of fused and burning light,

And so on, on and on and out and down.
You can see the shadow of Cerebus
Every summer morning before dawn
Not by looking down but up, like a priest.
Look up, and there’s the bigger mouth
Chewing the middle of the backbone
Of night, and beyond, all the eyes of all
The other hounds of hell, leashed together,
Clutched by the colorless hand of gravity.

Hierapolis has been destroyed repeatedly
By earthquakes, and you know where
Those come from. But columns still stand
Where the priests went once, and tourists
Still come to bathe in geothermal pools
In the glorious limestone glow of the light.
Around the fenced-off entrance to hell,
Sparrows, blackbirds, beetles, and wasps
Cloud the ground. You breathe the waves
Too much, you’ll fall down to your love.