First Light, In Your Honor
by Todd Jackson

If there was one moment in which,
One man in whom,
Apollo is first perceived

He is a man who lives hard, like his people, on stone floors.
He is small and simian with hunger-
-likely not man at all, by your reckoning-
Thinking of his people dragged off, one by one, by the cats.
The old, granted,
But no child is safe.
.No thought, here, of
When my child is grown.
Even mother’s-love is hesitant.
She holds her child. She will not meet its eyes.

The men can sometimes bring down meat
But there is no long standing by the meat,
Only a few handfuls before the cats arrive,
Walking proud across the land, big as small bulls.

The man is distinct. A fugitive sense that there might be more.
It is the thing before an idea, and that idea: The Future.

To him, Apollo comes as by This principle
You may slay the cats.
And He is in the growing quickness of gesture
Not to shatter a flint, but to shave it to an edge.

Copyright © 2007, Todd Jackson