The Midnight Ibis

by Brett Rutherford

     after a watercolor by Riva Leviten

On this foggy night, any river
     could be the Nile
and that dark thing afloat
     cold be the crocodile
that let the Moses-basket
     pass on by,
and laughed about it still
     with weepless eye.

There is a hooked-head shape
     arc’d like a scythe
with one bright orb that might
     be the isolate ibis, lithe
and tomb-art motionless.

Or it might be nothing,
     a sight not solid
an unnamed form made up
     of arc and column,
now gray on white, now white
     on gray,
cloud-tuft, fog breath dispersed.
     Sometimes it is the eye
that thinks a thing -- sometimes
     it is the mind that sees!

Ibis! the very totem-form of Thoth,
who gave the art of writing to Ani
(the first known scribe), your beak
suggesting stylus on paper roll,
chisel on somnolent basalt, hand-wave
of words to outlive the burning stars.

Ibis! watcher! listener! father
of cartouche and hieroglyph,
unsmiling arbiter of line and rhyme.

Ibis thou swift messenger of dreams,
of waking-moment revelation
of the impossibly true or to-be-true
(Hermes to the blue-skied Greeks),
your truth that fleeting visions,

unless inscribed, are gone like fog,
word-foam on a tideless sea.

Op. 891

First draft Feb 9, 2017