The Flood
Proud monument:
this City we’ve created.
A little lee against the cold.
How its aerie flag,
lit up with heart-swelling lights,
ripples hypnotically in the winter heights.
Estranged river,
moved by the same currents
as this flag on high,
how you tolerate your feigned taming
by these brash, befouling mites
unaware they emerged from you.
Stretching out from the greater sea,
rippling with cool unrest, a potential energy
unleashed effortlessly,
you solemnly observe these deepening infractions,
as yet assuaged by how quickly they dissipate.
And brother air, stretching out to void,
suffers the giddy metal insects
congesting his blowing emptiness.
Proud species,
spreading their electric grid over
the course of the earth,
even claiming the sky, the water.
Faces of laughter, faces of mirth,
faces of sorrow, faces of woe,
as they skate around and around blindly—
buoyed in love like angels in stasis,
rapt in hate like uncontrollable wildfire,
each mental landscape a world entire:
the infinite in the particular—
unknowingly forming art
whose patterns reveal
the undetectable Laws.
Nature frowns
as it reclaims
these lost, insatiable
vessels.
‘They’ve grown unaccountably
headstrong.
They don’t see I in them
or them in I.
Their blind longing
for the realization of my Mystery
is commendable,
and needfully—
beyond me.
But that which enlarges them
also makes them shackle me,
and forget me, and condemn me.
And so: they’ve had their fun.
Their frissons. . . copulations
and decimations.
The promise deferred.
Inexorably, the deal
is done.’
A tiny manmade light flickering
in the black emptiness
of space,
a caltrop island,
stretching outwards,
in heartbeat. . .
Breath dissolving on a windowpane.
Proud City,
standing on a foundation
of impossible achievement, tears,
and ignorance.
How you passed, for a moment,
through the repeating dream.
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