Now that the ground has opened
at the farthest edge of our continent
Now that the dead sit up in their beds
stripped of their flesh but not their accusatory stares
Now that the earth is suffering every grief
prophesied in every sacred text—flood,
fire, tremors, plague, fish dying in the rivers,
insects and birds falling out of the air
Even now, it is hard to imagine an ending so final
there is no new story to tell.
Maybe if I conjure a planet-wide eruption,
Pompei everywhere at once
with no archeologists left to unravel the clues—
no remnants, no monuments, no metaphors,
no memories—I can grasp the idea
for a moment, before falling back on But then….
Once while the grown-ups were hunting the children playing
Once while the children were making so much noise in the house
Once a hand came into the tunnel a hand with a large mouth
Once a hand with a large mouth with teeth in the palm of the hand
Once a hand caught the children who were making so much noise
Once a hand dragged the children out of the house one by one
except for two who hid under a large wooden bowl
Once there was so much noise in the house
the crushing of bones
Once the grown-ups returned to find
a pile of skulls and two children hiding
Now when the hand appears it is a sign and
the people in this village at the end of the world
are packing what they can, their pots and pans,
their blankets, their sisters’ stories. Moving
to higher ground until water reaches the peaks
and time runs out, as the signs proclaim
in uneven letters, children filling the park
downtown in my own city, mouths stretched wide,
joyful in their anger. They are loud, they chant
The sea is rising, so are we, they want the story
to unreel as human stories have always done,
tangled in places but then (but then) unknotting,
revealing an outlet or a portage or a bowl to hide under
even when grief arrives as prophesied, the next generation
burying their dead, mourning and moving on.
