like every other American who’s battling it out with 21st-century troubles,
while keeping an eye out for her and the horizon.
this is a mordant, knowing joke about how the world forgets
and what it remembers—oldest aquifers,
muses on loss and destruction, renewal and perseverance.
am I placeholder in this violent experiment,
picking up where the last poet left off,
making consistency, in this case, a virtue?
expand into a whole universe of dust and loss,
or I can write about the stunning beauty of the benign
like the broken bricks in a suburban driveway.
names may be fungible, but they’re meaningful here,
where the past is always present, even when I prophesize the future
as apocalyptic visions graced with flashes of humor.
listening to Gillian Welch records, always up for quiet adventure and clear empathy,
evoking the ways we all move between darkness and light in our lives,
with silly questions and dumb poems to make the days longer.