daybreak

we now live on the other side of history (history being the possibility of change through events), seven billion and growing, in gaia’s greenhouse, and yet there is still the hysteria of the original man pressed against the sea looking out at a vessel sailing toward the idea of an island. there is no chance now of our failure, even empires know eternal life and perpetual borders.

mandelstam, in his oratorio on the unknown soldier, revealed the long landscape of the world in an apocalyptic light. now manless russia is a lubricated, deflated balloon. WWII was the last act of the century, a spasm before a cruel but unqualified success, and the atmosphere is stretching the greenflash of daybreak out across the untouched hoarfields and oilfields. he expressed the last genuine concern for the fate of mankind, and everything since has been a fabrication. history became poetry.

the first few lines are a modified translation of that poem.

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mealy, arabesque sleet captured

the thousand speeds in a single ray of light

that pressed down

on my retina’s throat with its discolored heel

a mouse that failed to make the morning

curled up on the sidewalk

halfcovered in a wet jacket of first snow

i first mistook for a milkweed husk…

when the sky withdrew

they lay there in the thousands

wounded on the hill

eviscerated floss informing the wind

weightless, unwet

climbing the blue as high as they could get