PROGRESS

PROGRESS

The story is unlikely:
a dream of white walls, oak sills
twin beds, the north-facing window,
a radiator, Bing Crosby croons from the stereo,
a deluge of words that make no sense:
snake betrayal of the earth.
I must have known something, but how?
Like when the Challenger blew up, I saw something
from the Möbius strip teaser of time, convoluted
amoebas blossoming against a blue-mantled sky.
Tell me why we share dreams even now,
on opposite sides of the earth
with day and night between us?
I worry about where Einstein sleeps
and write elegies for the dead.
The Chernobyls, t he Manhattan projects haunt me—
my cousin helped to build the bomb.
The age of enlightenment burns words right off the page.
There's more work to do, I'm not sure what it is.
Think of the secrets locked inside stone,
where does the memory of the earth sleep?
Gaia. No wonder she trembles,
shaking parasitic cities from her skin.
I've planted a stone in the garden for you.
What else is there to do?
They say the role of the poet is to reinvent the myths.
It's not the accumulation of knowledge,
but something deeper, akin to the group mind of Neanderthals
born with the mythology of an entire species intact.
We work with a genetic cuneiform,
and have no rosetta stone to decode,
only vague hunches we call by the name of poetry.
What do we leave our children—
is this truly the last of the line—
venerable dinosaurs of the modern age?
Maybe none of this is real: we're fictional
characters, suspicious we don't exist.

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