The Thing I Most Want to Remember

My friend at Thanksgiving says it’s already

happened. By it, she means the apocalypse –

the end come and gone but we just haven’t

felt it yet, like a body that doesn’t know it’s

dead because the bones of the ear are the last to go,

sound still tickling the brain like wind chimes forgotten

in a dead tree. And I don’t know what to say

but imagine saffron monks screaming

into the ears of their recently

deceased and wonder what they might say, maybe

something like, It’s already happened!

or if they might also yell into dead

trees and what words I should belt out

to the beetle-killed hemlocks that barb

the mountains here, so many the canopy

creaks and sways the trail with a whole forest of little

more than widow-makers nowadays. And someone says,

Well, hell, pass the bourbon then, and I do, marvelling

how easy it is to pick up the bottle with my possibly

zombie arm, wondering if it’s true – that we’re living

off fumes, maybe already gone, but how would I know

because still I hear

the clink of soup spoons, the tink of the oven

working its heat around a turkey that is not

turkey at all but a miracle of manufactured protein

made to make hippies like us feel better about giving thanks

without dead flesh in our mouths but still enough to

give us that flesh feel – that pleasurable snap-back, craving as we do

the meaty fight real muscle puts up when chewed, because

we are animals who don’t want to be animals but still enjoy

the vestige of animal like the foetal dream of a tail

or water-breathing gills once slit into our unborn necks.

It’s already over, she adds. The shortages haven’t yet come, but they

will.  And so the table grows quiet, and I hear all our little mouth

sounds, a soft-smacking not unlike the wet popping of fish

suffocating in the middle of I-40 month before last

when yet another hurricane

receded, the floodwaters leaving behind a city of underwater

life stranded miles from their home, a stench

that had to be blasted with even more water

from a fire hose. The sound grew until

someone asks, Is that fake bird ready yet? and I get up to

check, thinking of meat again, of starving

polar bears happy to sink their teeth into

dolphins fooled by a warm current gone

wrong; or how I read that octopus were numerous

enough to climb out of the sea and drip from trees

back when Homer was alive, but last summer in Greece, all I saw

were their severed legs drying on laundry lines.

I can hardly swallow

any of it, so my brain takes me

somewhere I can go – to a small thing I can

manage – a quiet panic over

persimmons, because petty as I am, I fret if

next month I won’t be able to find them

at the store. It doesn’t make sense other than to say

I never paid much attention to those little edible

carnelians, those dusty Ozark tomatoes, but now that

they might be gone, I’m suddenly homesick

for that stubborn country-girl produce, hard as they are

at first, always tongue-parchingly tannic long before

finally giving in and turning themselves into a slick kiss

of sweet hiding under that thick skin.

There’s little else I can do, dead as I

might be, so I vow come December to fill my cart with them

once more, no matter how much they cost. I vow to do what

humans do – to greedily stuff into my body

the thing I want most to remember – and I will eat and eat and

eat them, making myself sick, testing

with my tongue the knowledge of fruit

that takes its sweet time to ripen, sometimes taking

months after it was yanked from its branch as if

it could live forever on the memory

of what it once was.

King Lear is dead

but miracles are still

likely to come.

The long march has halted,

the heart has fallen out

of the mouth of the city

and lies, like a small bloody animal,

at the crack of the curb.

Miracles are still possible.

Rain is falling on the homeless’

tent city. Should we weep now,

or have we missed the cue

long ago?

The King’s crown of weeds

has been tossed in the air

like a bride’s flower wreath.

He opens his eyes,

no dreams

want to come.

The tide rises, the tide falls like breath.

Miracles are still likely.