An Ode to the Thoth

She painted you over the course of five years. She painted you while bombs rained down on the city of London the way that raindrops pour out of darkened clouds, soaking through everything below, earth. You were sketched, drawn, perfected as gleaming planes pierced through the skies overhead; they zoomed, heavy with incendiary disaster tucked into their bellies.

A mere twenty years ago those same planes had still been such delicate, fragile things, constructed, it seemed, of paper, sticks, cloth. They were liable to fall back down to earth at the slightest of provocation, and yet men still climbed into them – out of boldness, thirst for adventure, the need to realize that collective dream, old as humanity itself, of flight, of dancing into the skies. Remember the myth of Daedalus, flying too close to the sun? Now men could soar, fly across oceans and continents, race, meet time limits, set records, go further and faster than ever before...

But they had evolved by the time she painted you. Now they were plated with metal hulls and painted with bravado, the slogans of war. They spit bullets and dropped payloads on cities by night and by day; they fought each other among the clouds, shooting and crashing down. The men inside of them died and new men appeared to take their place. Smoke and ash, the newest dimension of war.

She painted you, mindful of HIS direction. She painted three Magi – again and again until finally the one that captured the proper essence appeared. She painted careful lines, geometric forms, colors laden with meaning, esoteric significance, thought. She painted you boldly and brightly among blackouts, among rubble and deaths and air raid sirens’ shrill blares.

She painted you through global disaster and now, decades later, I hold you, shuffle, set cards down on black bedspread. Now you lead me, push, through my own life-disaster, so insignificant in the grand scheme of everything, and yet, nonetheless: keep going you tell me, keep moving forward and faster.

*And yes, I am aware that this is not the 'final' version of the Magus, but it is the one that I like best, personally