End of the Century
We’ve slept too long, and that hasn’t stopped the incidental warping—
constellations crossing, new diamond-scratch on glass.
Radio jumps off the bedstand. No one
can hear or see, as the Ramones hammer
in the background their future, our present alarm.
You were a Japanese print of stars before there were blocks of wood,
a satellite before legs, a second of parallax before any ticks were biting.
I love the short form of you, though no one keeps
time anymore, no one can say whose clouds
have stolen the stellar normal curves. Darling,
I remember now. I was supposed to report
on goats and goat paths in Eden. To trace wrens’ flitting
at the motionless peripheries. To stop
the briefest minute as it shrinks like a tide.
I have known so much less than awareness asked of me.
Seaweed in the astral sea looks everywhere
to find the light in which it swims.
A lovely, lamented oilslick rocks,
rocks at star-set. The Great Bear will soon bash
a bird feeder off its pole, causing a supernova of sunflower seeds.
But nothing arrives as gears and maps predict. Nothing rings
bright or smooth. I was supposed to report
that the universe is kinked, resistance
is the lark song that estranges us from C,
and there isn’t any scratch we could call a note.
I was supposed to record a tuna’s blue thrashing
in the foam of a soundless, television storm.
Wasps fly at our teeth, but miss and freak the screen.
It is beautiful to hear the sparks before we see them
in a window—in the window, our window-selves.
