“a shape with lion body and the head of a man,” ...
oh sphinx, you know better, don’t you? not a man but a woman, yes -- massive, stately, majestic, poised stone and magnificent in the desert imagination, jutting up from sere red dirt -- you hold the busy noise
of two thousand years in your massive mouth. all around you “civilization” swirls and dies, clouds scudding through hot skies. you survive famine, drought, pestilence, war, petty gods and their humans. as loud
as extinction, your enduring silence roars on the edge of our history, invention, struggle. the perfect marriage of creation, predator, goddess, monument, religions slide off your immovable haunches. wordless, you disparage
our attempts to stave off the inevitable, our puny deaths, our desiccation, our return to rock, and sand, and breath.
