Apocalypse Mid-Morning
Echoing sunrise. I might
have mistaken it for shimmer
the way a self, my own, fell revealing
a dew-dappled web, begging kin and kiln
to at last adhere and permanent.
Salmon ran boardwalk, anything nibbling
eager to greet the fishermen who
stand day after day empty and
knee-deep.
Tail feathers, a falcon’s, jut out the back of a tin
blinder. Worried that in this morning light
it might fly too high, ascending before the falconer.
The man who calls the park bench home,
engaged and spotlit beneath the false cypress
where a woman sits reading
aloud, incantations or narration
of this
dream.
Then, of course, there’s you and the way you’ve learned to speak
about and with the creatures of the street. Not language, but rhythm.
Pattern of tink. Silence
at the right time. Sound
at the right time.
Worlds held in the flickering breath and utterance.
Shadow’s horsetail brushes on the cracked and cresting street
rolling peak after peak and imagine the magnitude - an ant staring
down the barrel of pavement into the dark and deep.
Days like this the unseen ruptures through. As if the quake in the earth
revealed the world
again
in the very crack and shuddering.
I went on a run a few days ago where everything, even more than usual, was in relationship. People typically alone were talking with strangers, humans were engaging with creatures in ways out of the ordinary.
I had a teacher who wrote a book about ‘apocalypse.’ This book deals with the fact that the word originates from “old English apocalipsin, via Old French and ecclesiastical Latin from Greek apokalupsis, from apokaluptein.” Long story short, it means to ‘uncover’ or ‘reveal.’ Biblically this makes sense given Revelation. It is curious to me that we talk about uncovering/revealing in the same breath as the world ending.
I recently read Nobody by Alice Oswald, a great and strange little book that furthers and complexifies a minor character from the Odyssey. In it, she says:
“There are said to be microscopic insects in the eye
who speak Greek and these invisible
ambassadors of vision never see themselves
but fly at flat surfaces and back again
with pigment caught in their shivering hair-like receptors
and this is how the weather gets taken to and fro
and the waves pass each other from one colour to the next
and sometimes mist a kind of stupefied rain
slumps over the water like a teenager
and sometimes the sun returns whose gold death mask
with its metallic stare seems to be
blinking”
First of all, amazing. Second of all, it brings to mind shimmer and apocalypse. Perhaps it is no surprise that these harbingers of color, vision and revealing speak Greek. At its best, my poem is in conversation with this breathtaking page from Alice. Otherwise, it’s my version of Strava — a little run recap.
Thanks for reading.