Skandalon

Plumed gods have their own agendas, and fly where they will at whatever

     speed they choose, being gods, being plumed, and strike the earthly air

as they choose, being choosers and not the chosen; but choosing can be

     their weakness, the chink in the godly adamantine, not quite so open

as the term “Achilles’ heel” connotes—demigods being oddball hybrids—but

real enough. And so when this god, pimped out in his serpent form—

for the benefit, one supposes, of the masses—chose to turn and see:

     not to treat the human world as a slum of mortality, beneath his notice

but actually to look, it was his undoing; and what did the priest

     on his pyramid offer that so distracted an Eternal? The usual: a sacrifice,

but one so exquisite that even the cruel god was dazzled: on the altar

above its pit of acidic flame a single butterfly, glamoured, etherized,

then meticulously dismembered, as the rapt god watched, with a knife

     of priestly obsidian itself shaped like a butterfly, the priest wielding

not only the knife but a lifetime of disciplined skill, and love for the god,

     and love for the butterfly, and a body odor so acrid

it made the priestly donkeys and all the gathered virgins retch—

but gods are beyond that, their contempt for humankind is so refined

that anything of the body escapes them, which is what the priest knew

     as he carved his monarch’s wings in a series of hierophantic gestures

that appeared to be an efficacious magic of indeterminate kind—so the god

     thought, for gods always think that way—but in fact were nothing

but a signal to his hidden assistants: and so when the trap was sprung

the god was disempowered by a godly wonder of his own devising

and was turned, on a plinth of quartz, in one shrewd human stroke,

     into this stone being you see before you now, my children, one eye still

gazing at the deconstructed butterfly which now is millennia turned

     to dust, and the other eye, a perfect study in godly outrage, still fixed

on your hungry hearts, my children, hating each of you with a godly passion,

and waiting, waiting forever if necessary, for that hatred’s unveiling.