The Ophiolaters

I remember walking up that great bald slope with him,
mentor and friend Mentor whose visage Athena stole,
who walked with the slow plodding of the damnable,
and who, I wish to reiterate, was my friend.
But I went down the mountain alone
preparing in my mind to be my own Mentor or else to be,
in the end, sacrificed as he was,
like the priest at Nemi, like Balin and Balan,
like Odysseus ought to have been,
by the worshipers of the antediluvian gods who shed their participles
and leave behind the slime of their trail
and writhe about in the dust ever since they were punished
for a crime they did not commit.
The ophiolaters stood encircled by their own
swords drawn and downpointed beneath the hoods they wore
as they waited to sacrifice my friend
by torchlight.