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I wake to see a cardinal in our white
crape myrtle. My eye aches. Bees celebrate
morning come with their dynamo-hum
around a froth of bloom.
Though presently it’s paradise for the bees,
noon will reach ninety-nine degrees.
Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’ hui
will stultify in ennui.
I watched Raging Planet on TV.
Earth’s orbit around the sun appears
to alter every hundred thousand years.
Each thirty million years,
mass extinctions attend Earth’s
traverse of the galactic plane.
The asteroid rain that cratered the moon
returns, brings species’ deaths.
In the Hudson Bay region of Quebec,
the Laurentide ice sheet
only a geological eye-blink
ago lay two miles thick.
Disasters preceded us, like violent parents.
Pangaea’s fragmenting land mass
drowned origins like lost Atlantis:
an enigma for consciousness.
These continents will re-collide
in their rock-bending tectonic dance,
as once before Tyrannosaurus died.
So change continues by chance,
as if meaningless—granite to sand,
sand to sandstone, sandstone to sand.
In five billion years, the sun will expand
to Venus and Mars, then end
planet Earth. The hydrangea blooms
its dry blue, burns a brown lavender.
Earth whirls in space and August comes—
this slanted light my calendar.
As I water the pink phlox, I wonder
what use there is for a world of matter—
why the universe exploding into being invents
night and star-incandescence?
We are the part of it that feels it,
thinks it, seeing this time in its slant
on bloom with our physical brains that
change it as they sense it.
We become. We hum a story as tune,
in sonata form that runes this sphinx-
riddle sequence as notes that the pharynx
fluctuates, to mean.
So “This Nearly Was Mine” assuages,
braced against old loss and war.
Emile de Becque sounds rich with knowledge
of children and love, before. |
