TRACY GAUGHAN
to construe. So, from out a satchel, elder took a mirror, small, round, and gold as an autumn leaf - a Venetian amalgam said traded for jade in the deserts of Azerbaijan. He placed it in his palm, turned it up to the roof and the mirror pulled beasts from the cosmos one star at a time. They dropped like diamonds in a pool in his hand. As night followed
night new patterns appeared and as earth rushed east, the stars drifted west until younger read the sky in the mirror like a book, one page at a time. One night, as elder lay sleeping, he put the axioms of tuition to use alone. In the morning, tales of an unknown beast. A monkey in the mirror. Face like a walnut-shell big as the moon, breaching the eastern horizon. Feverish with fascinations of new constellations and cometary theory, the riders rode out to find Ulugh Beg’s finest observatory. But they left behind younger’s macaque still trading figs for apricots, in trees atop the monastery roof.
© Tracy Gaughan 2020 December Volume One POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net
