Marie-Claire Bancquart

It's been two thousand years now that, with a wounded leg,
the god's amazing loves have dragged along.

He has aged. Soon
he won't be noticed except from way up in a plane
in the markings of wheat
that yield the trace
of an ancient sanctuary.

He solicits a language of caresses,
open pasture, available bodies,

and the words refuse, and this elsewhere is already in his death
except for a slender purple flower under the sun.