1.

 

The familiar becomes extreme:

            I'm calling & calling with no reply

(invoking the silences in song)--

            days lose their dailyness, or

 have too much of it, the losses happen

            without redress; what, then, is there left to depend on?

It's not that there aren't names for things. But the things. Terror

            of "the true," lineaments of virtue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2.

 

It's the small words

            not " for them" but

"to them." Smallest of words

            making us smaller, leaving us/them

homeless. What we do with them. The first

            responsibility: to not be crushed, to not

crush. Home is a word we defend. And the children

            don't speak.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

3.

 

God of the unpossessable earth: or

            is chance the word we give to the set-up

we don't want to see? So much swept up by gale-force winds, new-age

            torrential rains, signs buckling under the set-to. In

the aftermath, in the disheveled streets, lost signs are lost

            promises. What's judged worthy is put beyond it.

For all that's bent, broken & beyond repair, let the stars ravish heaven.

            The light, the post-catastrophic light, rises; is pink over mazed trash.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4.

 

Signs of what we will be.

            Floods submerge streets, street signs, houses.

From the sky, the flat expanse of water is accomplished

            Fact. Birds are departed, & their sweet questionings.

 A thousand-year flood. And then another.

            What can we take in? What, by blindness or

Resolution, will we be? The landscape's gone, the old

            Language is dying. I cannot comprehend it. Is mercy.