The Mysteries of Solitary Dragons

Dragons are peretive, wendic verses,

Flying foreign coils unfurling, thoughts caught

In transit, grave sages, monstrous serpents

Forever ruminating, wanderers.

Dragons are winged paradox—satanic

Horrors as children’s allies, rain bringers

As creators of drought. They don’t exist,

But when they breathe, we can see the results.

Every dragon dreams an aspect of fact,

An aspect that suffers for proving false,

A necessary enemy of myth,

The truly unknown, hic sunt dracones.

There are those dragons that know we love them,

Want them, draw them, tell them, sail them, sell them,

And there are their mysterious sources,

The solitary dragons, ten in all.

~The dragon of random surfaces hides

An intricate order, a treasure map

Among its scales, stable but on the brink

Of rippling gold muscular destruction.

~The dragon by the name of Azazel,

Inventor of weapons and cosmetics,

A wilderness in culture that culture

Wished back into wilderness, one thick book

Crawling along, library still attached,

A giant sand worm churning, returning

To swallow every sin-filled scapegoat sent,

Dwells in starred deserts, docile between meals.

~Wavlen, the dragon that lives in night’s sea,

The dragon that is the sea, the ocean

Whose teeth and scales alike are waves, nothing

Much but waves, has anchored more than one god,

Cannot be slaughtered or subdivided,

But rejoins its waves after every cut

And ruins every sword, Leviathan 

Of everything, infinite finities.

~The dragon of invisible masses

Hides in spinning galaxies and snickers,

Too dark to be seen in the brightest fires

Burning quanta can make, a fantasy

For the most serious philosophers.

Oh, to find that invisible dragon,

The dark that holds the cosmos together,

The black pulse puffing out our universe!

~The dragon of answers gnaws its own tail,

Consumes its own ejecta, fresh questions: 

Ourobouros, loneliest of dragons,

Metabolic solipsist, life living.

~The forest dragon named Humbaba guards

The cedars from the wars. It hugs the trees

And blunts the axe, and if the god who rides

The cloud is thundering in the mountains,

You may be sure it’s Humbaba he fights,

Monstrous Humbaba still resisting him,

Humbaba brought low by a godlet king

And companion, first knights to slay dragons.

~ The farmers’ dragon named Long, glittering

Serpent, horizontal asterism,

The river dragon swimming the seasons

All night, announcing the spring and autumn,

Much prettier than Litan, much less fierce,

Still watery although composed of stars

For scales, night for limbs, xian mount, auspicious

Peregrine, shines on fields and blesses them,

Long, the torch, the boat, the parade, the proud

And cheerful cousin of the crocodile,

Dragon of cornucopia, culture’s

Colorful haul, yang to Azazel’s yin.

~Treefold, three-headed, trialist dragon,

Fierce, flames and fury, the dragon of theft,

The one who swoops down on battening sheep,

Hideous, always up for innocence,

Never dreams and is never the dreamer,

Is the dream, rainbow-scaled, studded with teeth,

The creator and destroyer serpent, 

Sleep itself, whose eggs hatch selves, ghosts, and souls.

~The dragon of light, the enveloper,

Ancestor of every known form of fire,

Blinds its victims, who are its worshippers,

With the obscuring gift of prophecy.

The body of light consists of angels.

It rises like a ladder in the night

And is the dragon most responsible

For concealing its invisible kin.

~ Last, the evasive dragon of enough,

Which neither flies nor swims nor crawls from caves,

Is not a colorful form in the sky,

Not a pattern in the stars, not a light,

Not discoverable in underworlds,

Not enveloping, not invisible,

Without hunger, without any answers,

Nothing, the empty set, which is enough.