Nebuchadnezzar

"This is the interpretation, O king

That they shall drive thee from men

And thy dwelling shall be with the

beasts of the field."

Daniel

The king become animal thinks as the horse does

or the hare:

Of heat and a hole.

What the hairdressers combed houses lice: the ringleted

and the scented hair,

And the fingernails trimmed by the barbers of Babylon

Are clawed like a bird's.

He runs in the long grass, or in the buckwheat, shot at by farmers,

hated by the dogs of the herds.

The large inviolate brow behind whose bone the planets turned

and geometry smiled

Unlearns now what with difficulty a king learned:

The gesture with the sceptre, the angle for the crown,

the vices of ambitious men.

Here an animal hunts, eats grasshoppers, urinates against trees,

sleeps in his dung in a den.

Walk among the cool elaborate pillars of the palace

and ask, "Who's king here?"

But the armored immobile guards have been warned. It is said,

"Nebuchadnezzar has gone abroad for a year.

He visits his cousin, the King of the Hebrides.

He travels incognito on a foreign ship."

Lean, apologetic, the ambassadors conduct the stranger through

the desolate gardens,

The cellars racked with his imported wines, the bed chambers

Immaculately and beautifully kept

Here he listened to his favorite music, there he enjoyed

the eucalyptus shade at noon,

Here His Majesty slept.

Progress on the vast forbidding pyramid is reported,

the splendid burial place

Proceeds stone by quarried stone, chamber by ingenious chamber,

fronted with his face.

Whether they can keep the secret forever or whether

the truth inevitably must slip

Somehow despite the ambassadors' vigilance, the enforced silence

of the armored guards,

And rumor run the length of Babylon no one ventures to predict.

Meanwhile all that inherited power is debased to an animal's paws.

What fears it acquires

Are other than the fear of assassination or the fear of dreams

In which he saw himself first the great tree then the broken root.

He moves on all fours,

Answers the horned owl, the wild hair grows out of his eyes,

drinks the pool's green scum.

The black forsaken eunuchs,

The women of the interior gardens, the effeminate musician

with the doeskin drum

Long for their love who lies by the secret waterhole,

their lord who springs

Now at the paralyzed rabbit while Death slobbers in the woods

and madness sings.