The Injured Future
Far left cluster the listeners, their heads lifted toward the speaker.
Two boys tease a dog in the foreground near a horse with a raised hoof.
The speaker holds his finger to the sky.
The fly over the horse’s tail hovers, despite the breeze.
The sun’s radiance–long dashes–telegraph sunrise or set
the way the center squad of horses, their riders
leaning forward in the epitome of speed, mean
either progress or retreat. The bell ringer on tiptoe
silences the woman-with-open-mouth. She knows.
A last bird wings over her, to dive or announce fish, fusion, or fertility.
The forced landscape behind it insists, with palm and cypress,
limes and firs and olives, that ocean is necessary where sky
and its dashes go thin. In the farthest corner a single figure,
as lone as his parapet suspended in the perspective,
loses his grimace, narrowing his eyes to aim.
This is not a Christian parable but a scene beside the sea of what next?
so deathless white flags flap along the border out of unison,
the visuals of violence, the future of T.V.
