And the rest, of course, is campy, cinematic history -
But thus did I begin to romance
the grandeur of the Celestial Clockworks

And finally, at long, long last
as foretold in the tom-toms
of our ancient astronomic
calendars and codices
there came to pass
along the 45th parallel
on my seventeenth swing
'round the summer sun

a total eclipse in my time-space continuum
turning downtown Dexter into a Mayan Mecca
swollen with sun-worshipping eclipse-chasers
offering up sacrifices of dance and joyful noise,
exotic pilgrims from the seven seas posturing
their Pentaxes and pilgrimatics in
a United Nations' shutterbug encampment
pitched in a forest of transient tripods -

But on a mile-away farm I get to feel first-hand
the Apocalyptic Horseman approach of totality...
witness the wondrous and clumsy panic of
cattle lurching hurriedly for the mid-day barn
before the rapidly falling Old Testament dark
and they're confused as any
silver-screen headhunters whose world
the gods have damned to annihilation

And a chill like
the Shadow of Death
in this noon-black midnight
generates (even in me)
an unexpected
God fearing - and then

The cows are plodding back to pasture
the salmon sky grows blue again
and somewhere...

a rooster crows

Sincerely, Tom Lyford
poetry at www.festivo.org/lyford