::
Someone no longer alive
is hovering over a great expanse of smartweed, panic grass, and midden
where a house used to be
where trees and gardens once flourished
where puddles and ponds held a sky of clouds and stars
in place
for a moment
and you lived there . . . Ah, my dear
::
I speak from the liminal space where your beloved’s last barely audible breath
slipped into your body
then out the window into the winter chill, whose horizon line it rolled up as if
it was twine
into a point, a still point—
a full stop that opens the heart
From that point, I speak
::
As once you washed the body of your beloved
let us wash
for the last time
this one earth, this only, and only once, for once and for all
earth
as if it were a lover who has died, and we, not knowing what to do
at last must wash the poles, north and south
where long ago the ice
cracked open
sheared off
and melted
Last, the mountain peaks
Last, the crowns of oaks and maples, on whose bare branches long strips of torn
plastic flutter
Also the steeples, the turrets, the domes
Last, the open fields and meadows, wash them clean
the vast desert and its last oasis
riverbeds and shrunken rills
ravines and gullies
the rocky promontories from which we viewed the sea
as it rose to cover the cities
Last, the cities
submerged full fathom or in low tide only the towers and the tips of the high-rises
winking up
Last, the sidewalks, shop windows, market stalls
Last, pebble, shell, and skull
Last, lark
and satellite, wash them, and the field of broken mirrors
Last, the house
Last, the bed
Last, the hills of midden, and their treasures
a button
a seed
a feather
a zipper
a chip of china plate
Last, the nose cone, the black box
Last, the trawler, the landing gear, the microchip, the missing part
Last the kiva, the sweat lodge, the drum
Last, the prayer rugs, the pews, the cushions
Last, the seat of enlightenment beneath what remains of the small tree’s spreading
canopy
Last, the factories, the foundries, the mills
the maze of subway tunnels
the turnstiles
Last, the eye of the needle through which we could not pass
Last, a gun, a mine, a missile
Last, a bridge
Last, middle C on the piano, last a cello, a violoncello, in particular the Sonata
for Violoncello no. 2 in D, op. 64, by Heinrich von Herzogenberg
precious because it was the last music you listened to
precious because, like the last word your beloved spoke, you did not know it was
last
Last, the pattern of fish displayed on ice, and their many-eyed, one-eyed gaze
Last, the last whale beached on the shore at Truro
Last, the glint of an eye in the periwinkle, the lovely, sinuous ripple of a reclusive
snake
Last, the chemicals, the vitamins, the pills, the chemicals
Last, a hearing aid
a pair of binoculars
a surgeon’s knife, a sling, a robotic hand
Last, to list only a few from the multitude that perished, fox and laughing
gull, swallowtail and hawk
lion panther coyote vole giraffe mosquito trillium hummingbird hibiscus owl
Last, the very last line in a poem by Rilke
the line
you can’t forget the ache of, the line you didn’t enact, not one syllable
of it—
You must change your life
::
Space, of course, lasts
I walk upon it, as one would walk on a tablecloth for a table no one will set
What’s left of my eyesight has dimmed, what I hear is only wind
and that, muted
And because I have nothing to write on, I build cairn after cairn, lifting stones
balancing them
touching what remains in place, as if it were a new alphabet, or a sentence in Braille
You are reading the last of the earth’s last rivers and mountains—do you
know that?
These stones, these silences
the last words
held in mind for a moment
as if they were a net of fireflies shimmering in a summer field one can’t tell apart
from a night sky and stars
Wash them
each stone, each firefly
wash them clean
this one, a love cry
that one, lament
and the last one the wing of a warning you might still be able to hear
just as once, long ago
you caught the smoke of the oracle rising from a rift zone at the center of the earth
::
If these cairns, these stone syllables, survive, there may be no one left to read
the poem they make—
but if by chance, there is . . .
let the stones be read aloud, so that a human voice
might widen its reach, floating off among the stars like the ringing-through
of a great bronze bell
like the audible layers of birdsong gradually moving west as dawn
brightens, or used to
and the great earth turns
