Leslie Harrison

& the fall of empire sounds like sirens in the night in the whitehot afternoon in the periwinkle dawn

& the neighbors who hear fireworks as bullets and bullets as a celebration

& lights as if the carnival were in town the slickblack streets the lights a flickering carousel the horse fallen from its pole, covered in some scald of a blanket

& here let us hide the blood the body the ugly real empty of it all

& the sound of rain like some western herd wild horses bison elk some other ungulate their careening through ever smaller fields into ever larger fences

& the sizzling pop only one person heard awake deep in the night as a transformer turned up the dark

& snow sighed about its own fate just before it disappeared

& the sight of a nurse’s fingers their indifferent pinch on the syringe the world whorled whirling and then just gone

& when you come back there’s no evidence there’s supposedly no harm

& all those cascading neutrinos hurrying in perfect loneliness

& they ask you who you are and you are a colony a nest a horse running into fences

& trying to escape

& the fall of empire is a sad duck with hatchlings stuck under a grate

& the fall of empire is the difference between sleep and anesthesia

& when the elephant escaped its clown college its canvas jail

& searched for cabbages searched for grasslands thunder & dust

& the sound of empire is the sound of the marble gods under the hooves under the terrible claws

& carried off in pieces in the bloody jaws of the new gods

Tonight the helicopters colonize the stars

& the moon has gone dark

& the living birds perch tucked against leaf and trunk

Tonight I think of orchestration—the wheeling politicians

& their long game of hate

& guns

Tonight I’ll lie down in the soft bed and sleep

& wake

& the world will grow incrementally hotter

Tonight the traffic hums in all the ways—high- free- belt- and thru-

& by dawn the night will finish claiming its million dead

Each night we count about the same number

& those are just the ones with backbones

& we assign more value to anything with a spine

Tonight in politics they’re all exoskeletal old as dust

& perhaps the jellyfish is just the second largest animal without a heart