Ptolemy on the banks of Egypt’s Mediterranean shore, old drunkard,

weaning from the cosmos a guide for his treatise of relics.

This matter of the sciences, the natural philosophy that led him

to me, and conversely, me to you, to this, this inhabited world.

Each hour, those constellations blink and spurn knowledge,

I laugh out loud, hissing “thunder creaking forward into brains,”

like a splinter of thoughts, or an ice particle, in deference to

winter’s end, melting towards the center of reverie and vice.

Now on Ptolemy’s Alexandrian port where the ships led us to you,

And us to Syria there is a booth–Yes, that booth there!–where a boy selling

fruit hides in his pocket, buried beneath his linty smile, the truth.

That Eve was lost- the apple his now, inside it a worm for Ptolemy.

The stars only twinkle when the devil in his pocket smiles

Back his fanged hiss and hammer. The worm, spurned, swallows

The lint in the boys pocket and takes whole the form, the color,

Of Eve’s apple. “Why, the poor thing didn’t even know it was gone from her.”

So I speak in tongues and release the boy. It is my rotten apple now.

You keep the stars; their lives are not mine to hinder. But here

as Ptolemy wanders the barren fruitless ports of Roman Egypt,

Greek Alexandria sleeps a mid-day slumber, pockets for lint remain.

Tired and barren in our inhabited world. The devil has it!