Just Our Last Apocalypse

Our last era after
The few we’ve known in our
Handsomely brief fashion.

Call it the sixth era,
And then say, solemnly,
Our last one. Leave the rest.

The paperwork can wait.
Can you, at seventy-eight,
Whatever age you’ve made?

Hard not to have in mind
Some apocalyptic
Landscape, setting aside

Apocalypse would have
To be traversed before—
No post apocalypse

Before apocalypse,
And wasn’t that the bit
You’d been hoping to miss?

Thoughts Kept in a High, Deep Lake

Each adventure, another
Bubble in your minor past,
Each block of concrete sheds dust

Without obscure allusions,
Abstract, aureate diction,
Or other clumsy displays

Of old lyric aesthetics.
Wait. Back to those concrete blocks,
Really more easy-to-hand

Cement bricks. They can crumble,
Since compacted dirt is all
They are. Packed dirt, compressed clay,

Orderly blocks of baked soil—
These things were and were useful,
Well before anyone scratched

Or pressed messages, concrete
Or abstract on them. Sequence,
What sequences bubbles make.

The highest abstraction, say,
Ritualized, symbolic
Deep cave signification

Precedes the humble baked brick,
And commodification
Precedes, perhaps, the epic,

And then you look back across
The dust and the flood and see
The bubbles being swallowed,

And the whole scene lineless field,
No, not even quantum field.
The whole one choppy surface.

Bernice

Active soon for the latest
Bloom of music from woodwinds,
He’d been fine watching the real woods

Do their sort-of-feral thing.
Go back to scratching the hand
That fed her what it felt like

To be it in this tableau
Of brine, destruction,
And an affection for truth.

The Quarrel

Now the two texts are running
Near simultaneously,
And it makes you realize,

That one’s very relaxing,
While the other tangles air
Into impossible thoughts—

And which one will win’s the mad guess
No one can avoid guessing,
Once caught in the tangled gasp.

The wish is to flatten this,
Make it two-dimensional
So you can come home again.

What’s most startling
Is that, whatever home is,
Is here and nowhere near here.

Blue God

Others also claim to worship
Gods of peace and monotony.
And very possibly they do.

But you’re not going to service
This long and boring afternoon
By splitting the true from the good.

At the height of your faith, years ago,
When you could pray a spot of light
Up the wall with your gravity,

You cared for what your faith could do,
But now, no. Boredom is greatness
Of a most particular sort.