A Cartoon for Aristotle

It is a most commercial Hospital:

the calm attendants, dressed in dollar green,

have read the portents of the tinkling pumps

and hand out vitamins of gasoline,

or stand, like patient nurses at the side

of my black beauty, and stroke his shining hide.

They use thermometers, and probes and lances;

my buffalo's extinct each time he ails.

They serve him the lead-poisons of prescription

and scratch away his coat's infected scales,

and paint him with new salves to hide the fault,

lest with his age, the Age come to a halt.

They take, from cans and boxes in the driveway,

a chipped and broken sun packed in its fat

and stacked like dog-food for a snarling motor,

and feed his iron hunger. Marvel at

machines and miracles! that eat the sun,

while we stand by, like priests, to see it done.

Priest or physician, we know no defection,

who led the creature of the silver snout

up to the altar of a clanking clinic,

and drove the god in and the devil out,

past sliding doors, and darkness, until here

now, his smoke trails, like incense on the air.