Gods in the Earth

Copyright © 2011 Ernest Bloom.

The sky, transparent, runs away forever. The seas
of the world are infinite, wrapping all around this
garden of a globe. The multi-colored stars like hard gems
howl in the hungry and eager night, wailing over
hot jungles or soaring blue-gray rocky crosscut saw teeth
far above a straight-edge tree line, or outside skyscraper
windows where the winds blow hardy but impotent,
or above summer convertibles that barrel down desert
diamond highways between nests of neon with noisy
air conditioning units jutting from caulk-rotted windows,
clutching at wildly desirous hearts. The voices, the songs
of the hordes ring on, ring on down stainless steel
American corridors constructed at sharply acute angles
through brilliantly fluorescing fogs of time. I know
the cool clarity of light when the day is fading, or in
the morning before the sun is risen. I know the open
prairies and their frigid and silvery streams that run on
no matter which side has won the election, or the war.
I know the deer that start under the eaves that we
never see, and the tail-twitchy skittering of gray squirrels.
I know the bones interred as sacred relics of the dance
of genes down ten thousand generations, and how
the sweat dripped down to water the lands. The poor
history that's written down is the least memoir
of these heroic, immortal collisions of good fortune
and catastrophe. I know we are all gods in the earth
whose ears are stopped and eyes plucked out, hypnotized
by colorful turning motion and car chases and cheap,
flashing mirrors and white sandy beach bathing scenes
and other authorized ornamentation, and I'm not perturbed.
I know the brown sparrows and fuzzy caterpillars that watch
from thin branches, gone after a season, but always returning,
again and again.






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