King of the Gods

Maura McKee

I am a word-collector
working to fill pages

I trace refracted light with my pencil
while an old man gestures wildly
in front of pictures of Zeus
projected on a large white wall.

Zeus sits on a chair
and looks at his eagle,
who, in turn,
perches on a small, symmetrical,
evergreen tree.

All it takes is
one click forward
and now
Zeus is standing,
perfectly balanced,
ready to hurl a long spear

But the instrument is nowhere to be found
So the king of gods stands there, stupidly,
and I want to give him a surfboard,
sending him off to the beach.

Over an hour ago
I placed a wheel full of slides
on a projector
and turned on its light



One by one
little upside-down photos drop
into the line of that light
and become bigger than themselves
until another click
pops them back into crude reality

And so goes the happy carousel,
processing through history
in a pulsing, linear theme

I find myself wondering
if it brought the man pleasure,
this ordering,
the sifting and sorting,
and if he felt acutely methodical,
or if he considered it a ceremonial art.

He tells his story with images
while I attempt one with words
but we are standing in the same space,
balancing ourselves in such a way
that it is hard to tell
whether we are uncanny heroes,
stretching our arms out in opposite directions,
hurling our instruments with poise and grace,

Or whether
we have lost something essential along the way
and our stance is more of a static pose
that must be inserted in a plastic wheel upside-down
and projected by a light not its own
in order to resonate.

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