Milton’s Satan


Diabolical heat for that time of year.
A fan whirred and hissed.
A digital clock blinked on its table.  
Self-will was pulsing:    
I ached to fly off and find the last of our children,
gone too far away to college.
The nest was empty. Burned. The ceiling
 
of her room still showed its poster for Some Like It Hot, 
shriveling after long years  
when Monroe looked down on a herd of plush deer
and other mild creatures
now ragged with age. I imagined imagination  
might cool my soul: I wrestled to mind
a gentle meadow dotted with flowers,

the checkered shade of a hardwood stand in fall,  
a small brook’s ice-jeweled pools,
and last, an unmarred quilt of snow 
on our cellar bulkhead.
Such willful visions wouldn’t hold. The meadow was scorched, 
it was tunneled by rodents, and parasites thrived   
in the tree-trunks, mosquitoes would hatch from the streambed. 

The snow looked pure but mercury laced its flakes.  
Her absence was bodily ache.
It throbbed. It scalded. There were reasons to think of Satan,
his imperious will,
will’s ruinous conflagrations.  Which way I fly,  
Milton’s devil claimed, is hell.  
Satan said, Myself am hell.