Ancient Options

by Rush Rankin

i

The pressure in a labyrinth of silhouettes
fascinates and bewilders the Iranian poet
in a warren of underground apartments
and studios when he’s researching
the future.  In an office sound-proofed
by Persian rugs on the walls, an unsmiling,
joking, skeptical old man, always suspicious
of sunlight, produces fake passports
for a blind couple.  Delicate spiders
shuffle across the ceiling.

ii

Note: The weary counterfeiter, who wears
dark glasses for effect, like the blind,
fails to test the shuffling noise outside
in time (as lights flash
into darkness all over the city).

iii

Whether unwise or just confused,
like Rousseau, who said American
dogs don’t bark, or Jefferson,
who resolved to free all slaves
he didn’t own, the poet can’t find
the algorithm that relates
one atrocity to another,
though he and his colleagues
read The New York Times.

iv

Even with the monitored ethic of class
discussion and obsolete manners
a comedic teacher discovers people
in Kansas value religion
and the inoculation of babies
and cows more than the public
function of taxes.  Nothing
else is clear through a window
on the ground after a storm lifts
a mythic house into the sky.

v

The impetuous thinker who points
a light into light, the dark into darkness,
treats the darkness as light, the light
as darkness, hut stays in Italy
on sabbatical, like a reasonable person.