Ten Implosions

Smell of iron in the wind off the mesa--the man at the desk looks up, tasting axehead, knife blade, ghost's chains, his mother's womb-blood.


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Before bed, turning out the last light in the house, she saw the chemical formula for darkness inscribe itself inside her eyelids.


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He felt ill and lay down as the last bus disappeared into the tunnel with men in suits reading headlines, the markets sliding into fever.


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In the poem, a girl in a library sleeps, her face on a book; I read her skin in its paper, spot of drool in the margin, a hair in the gutter.


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All the angels in Rilke gather at the bookshop to argue with Whitman: who touches this book touches what?


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A couple in a convertible at midnight, arguing bitterly; moon half eroded by the solar wind; at roadside a dead coyote, half eaten by ants.


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Willows laced over the pond water of history, their image fractured by the ordnance of a war only the dead remember, or a simple wind.


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What happened at the end, when everyone thought there was no one left to think, was simple: they forgot it all had ended, and went on.


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There was always filth, someone had to touch it, love it, lest it fade like the traces, eons after, at great distance, of a burnt-out star.


*


At the end of the world an empty beach, empty sea, empty wind, flat, lifeless, leaving nothing behind but its poisonous etching of salt.