The End of Crisis

When you leap over the deer carcasses

that line every garden, you will marvel

at their tidiness, at how bloodless a death

by drought can be. When I crawl through

the highway pieces shattered by heat,

I will admire the clean slits as I kick

aside crumbles of broken stone with little

blistering. When you thread between

the overtaken shores and bodies of elders,

frozen, when I follow the fallen saplings’

directions toward the horizon where

colorless sky and earth meet, we will

remember rippling at the birthday parties

for corporations and framing the ash

of beloved photos burnt in wildfire. When

we think of crossing the river to each

other, you from the gorge of the landslide

to me at the crest of the typhoon, it is then

we will find ourselves in a dead imaginary,

in some fictive past where the  you exists,

where I   is not a myth we use to keep

surviving at the cost of bird and glacier,

home and tenderness. Having ruined

the future of  becoming fossils, finally

we will know that it is for nothing we

die, never in place of drowned sea

turtles or swarming locusts, or to foil

cancerous sand and mold, not even for

the dance of subway floods or the graceless

eclipse of all our promises and planets.