If Plato had not been born with a silver spoon

in his mouth, bees would not have known to settle on his lips

as he, an infant, slept. Nature’s omen of that sweet style

to come, that mind honeyed by the Divine before flesh,

before sweet childhood of wrestling and grammar.

Aristotle’s river of gold prose was at first: gold.

Cicero means chickpea but his hands picked only

books from shelves, quills from wells of ink.

Augustine had to speak Latin before he could tell of his God

who made the universe not in seven days but in one hot instant.

There might have been a thousand blacksmiths

who dreamed of caves. One might have seen in the cats

slinking and snarling on the village streets, the maggots

squirming in week-old rye bread—a great chain of being.

Perhaps one saw in the swirls of clouds the city of God

and knew, before Augustine, love as kingdom, love as gate

and lock and key. But if a bee had journeyed to his lips,

sticky with heat, he would have thought: sting, not sign.

If he, too, had heard at 33 a child-like voice insist,

take up and read! How useless, his hands too stained,

too filled with tongs and bellows.

And his child, the child of child, the one, the next, the next, again—

all might have seen the flicker of flame on wall and understood:

chain, puppet, form. All might have known everything 

and written nothing, told no one but the forge as it heated,

the anvil as it was hammered. Even when Luther

posted his 95 complaints in Wittenberg, a blacksmith

must have welded the hinges of that church door, 

a blacksmith might have understood each reason already.

His four nails cold in Luther’s midnight hand.

His door’s lock. His key, somewhere deep

inside the church walls, on the desk, in the drawer, slipped

beneath an unreadable book with the ninety-sixth reason

written right into the metal.