i. Data
Omitted from calculations, all manner of plausible certainty,
this rock of burden bleeding the way oxen do when driven home. Here,
a projection of growth, exponential: a hot bird touches a hot stone. Now, a graph:
a hot bird touches a hot stone in a hot palm. Next slide: a hot bird touches a hot stone
in the hot palm of a prophet of profit (good one, Dan!) orange horizon
of hot meaning touches a hot bird touches a hot stone, scaled to market
—blood on the wheel and dusk, now. Away to their model homes and sliding doors that lock.
The charts say what they say, It’s in the bag.
The men leave the room; the desk chairs spinning like slow planets, You killed it in there, man.
ii. Land
Some places the water comes spitting out the faucet clear as brown.
The rivers are dead; bloat and murk. Brooks that once babbled all day lay silent under blankets of algae. The men around are dark from roofing in spring. One leans against a wall
opening a clay brick in his hands. Another points to the busy writhing in the black socket of a cow and says, Look—a dead ringer for somethin alive. A third reaches for the ground without thinking,
overcome by a sudden memory of something called a dandelion that sent wishes into the land.
iii. Scape
But this radioactive swamp was my father’s, and his father’s father’s. Our hurting mud is all God’s,
Do not throw my clothes out into the yard of space—where other rock can I go
that doesn’t groan under the weight of such need unbearable? Where snow does what snow does
and there is no gold to find at the end of an oil slick rainbow.
Show me a porch that doesn’t look out on a circle of grief, show me an Earth
whose people bathe her skin in rivers, and wrap her body in long grass.
Show me the room where the decision was made and the papers drawn up; show me a child
who isn’t dead in the alley behind it, eyes cloudy with the first dream ever dreamt
the same dream that awoke the first man to the sputtering embers of the first night,
the same dream that unsettled him with a hope he couldn’t name as he looked to the many stars.