1. New World
Right there, where the sun winks green, and polished
copper edges zinc, bells dong
our doom from half-built towers. Nothing
is hypothetical anymore: not these slate
clouds in glass air, this sleight
of hope, these big shadows
landscape-sailing our breakable
acres, nor we, so recklessly
ourselves, so cogged with generosity
and lamentation, so urgently eye to eye.
2. Occurrence
Now by
now,
brown leaves
under-
foot, no choice
but to over-
look the un-
bearable,
every lie
an ideal.
3. Chain
And thus contingency commenced
its explosive renaissance. No matter what
you intended, circumstance was the only word.
That rumble beyond the horizon, that silver
beam shooting under black clouds, laminating
the western walls with radiant
imminence—nothing was so real. We navigated
eternal dissolution with our kitchen
radio dances, our drunken embraces.
I touched you in that tiny
place and unconsciousness rippled across
your forehead. Children remained our bright
angels of insubordination, but consequence
inevitably followed
consequence. The refugees lined up, broken
by factuality, holding out
their salt-stained hats; the spigots wheezed,
birds fled the woods,
and our own shadows stretched across
the countryside and into the sky.
4. Confidence Man
He wakes us in the 4:00 a.m. quiet, sits us down
in our moonlit kitchen and, placing a cup of steaming
water in front of us, to which he adds a single basil leaf,
he talks in that unequaled voice. During blackouts,
he waits beside us while heat seeps through
the dripping air conditioner, and pedestrians walk home
by phone light, and he abides
until the refrigerator motor rattles on and the lamps flicker
brown, then bright. When we are old,
and our bodies are turning to that ugliest of meats, he hovers
at our bed’s end, weightless as an angel. But he is not an angel.
He has surrounded himself with acres
of consolation, but all we see is blue dust—faintly acrid
on the tongue, and it makes our eyes water.
“I wanted ours to be a perfect
union,” he tells us at the table in the back, candle out.
“I wanted every desire to be balanced, exactly,
by generosity. And stasis to be a form
of flight. But I was yammering
in my sleep. I was driving with my headlights
dark. And every word I told my love
was a lie. So here I am, waist-deep in cindered
beliefs, and I can’t stop lighting them. And I can’t make
this yearning leave. This yearning: my teaming city.
And I can’t stop my hope. I look at you and I am filled
with hope, and I am filled with yearning,
and I am hollowed out entirely, and I cannot
stop. I cannot stop.”
5. And
Over the black water, fog
begins, like the tender infiltration of not-being
into dawn. All gleams
have gone soft, the cedars flat
gray. All sounds
are small now, and end
in silence.