No form sharpening, no clutter
of umbilicus,
no fingers diverging from their webs.
Generation is an argument.
It
says
my finitude is my infinity: I will shape from it
another
&
another.
&
these will go on, like numbers
that through division can continue, if a Ii ttle less
each time-
But infants press
against two oblivions: the one before,
the one after. And one being
can never outrun two deaths.
Let's celebrate the emptiness, the other place.
Let's create, like God, both void
&
image.
And carry our end
as we've carried ourselves, in imagination-in film
&
theater,
statues
&
mirrors, the long gaze
at our own face.
Look in. See the earth
greening again: closing around
the long bright scars of cities.
When plastic's
rare, an honorable fossil . All glass
finally polished in the sea.
When the reign of the nude skin, the opposable thumb's
over, when the argument runs
whether bones should crouch or stand in the Hall of Humans.
Will it be crows who inherit? With towns
in treetops, winds holy , beauty a pure dull black.
Or beetles, asking themselves
how we ever made love, all gravity
&
heavy limbs.
Maybe by then the fumes of the toilet-tissue plant
will have risen past the atmosphere,
&
whales will be back,
thick as cattle, with a dim mythology of bloody ships.
Let's insist on contingency, on seeing
