19 Bahman 1404
Quatrain 17 of 75
“They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:
And Bahram, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass
Stamps o'er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.”
Reflection · Winter 1404
In winter Jamshyd's courts are exactly as described — cold stone, empty, the lion elsewhere, the lizard hibernating, the wild ass leaving tracks in the snow. The deep drinking is long over. What remains is the structure of what was, stripped of ornament by the frost, honest in the way that bare things are honest.
Fast asleep — Bahram's sleep is the long sleep, the deep one. Winter's ruins are the most honest ruins — no summer growth to soften them, no spring blossom to decorate the fallen stone. Just the stone and the cold and the proof that everything which once gloried and drank deep has arrived here. Not as tragedy. As completion.