Wotan Meets Siegfried

by Brett Rutherford

You, Wanderer,
     graybeard and granite-skinned,
          obdurate in wind, leaning
          upon an ancient staff:
what storm
brews now inside
those stony silences?

You loved
     a woman once, a son
     sprung from her easily —
     through him, a son again.
Is that the boy,
     now climbing the crag
     to goat heights,
     his golden locks
     a laugh
     at your receding gray?
Who are you,
     anyway, the stripling asks,
     under that hat?
     Why is its brim so wide,
     why does it droop
     across your face like that?
You answer
     uneasily, It is the way
     of travelers to bend
     a hat against the wind.
He spies
     your missing eye,
     your need to defend
     a sightless side.
     Somebody else whose way
     you blocked, no doubt
     he plucked that eye out?

Taunting,
     the young man edges
     to pass,

     barred by
     your swifter arm,
     your staff of ash.

You know him now:
     Siegfried, son of Sigmund.
     You say: The eye I lost
     is one of the ones you use
     to see the one I have left.

He is not much for riddles.
Lunging, he breaks your staff.

He pushes you aside
like an inconvenient boulder.


You have nothing to tell him
he cares to hear about.
Like father, like son:
even with ravens to help,
you never saw anything coming, either.
Entropy scorns the immortal.

[Revised May 2019]