Free Station Zed by Tom Sleigh

mirror? Back of it all, when I
    indulge my second sight, all I see are dead zones:
    no grandchildren, no evenings at the beach, no bonfires
    in a future that allows one glass of wine
    per shot of insulin. Will we both agree
    that I love you, always, no matter
    my love’s flawed, aging partiality?
    My occupation now is to help you be alone.

Songs for the End of the World
1
    On the other side of praise
    it’s time to chop down the tall tree in the ear—
    enough enough with the starlit promontories—
    a nervous condition traces itself
    in lightning in the clouds,
    a little requiem rattles among Coke cans
    and old vegetable tins
    and shifts into a minor key
    blowing through the dying ailanthus,
    grieving to the beat beginning to pour down
    percussive as a run
    on a nomad’s flute of bone
    while a car engine dangling from a hoist and chain
    sways in a translucent gown of rain.
2
    Where does it go when it’s all gone?
    Coleridge’s son, Hartley,
    wants to know what would be left if all the men and women,
    and trees, and grass, and birds and beasts,
    and sky and ground were all gone:
    everything just darkness and coldness
    but nothing to be dark and cold.
    Which was what my father
    imagined all the time,
    calculating with his slide rule the missile’s
    drag and lift, as he smeared
    across the paper the equation’s
    figures propelling his pencil lead
    into the void.
3
    And after splashdown, what?
    An emptiness like an empty subway car
    stumbled into by mistake
    on a drunken night
    turning into
    morning
    with the world
    stretching out
    like wind walking on a lake?—
    the body wavering, almost
    disappearing
    into the inside-outness of being
    in that emptiness, its peaks and valleys
    and absolute stillness?
4
    His shadow anchored to a semi’s tires,
    down there with the mussels, oysters, a starfish even
    that twice a day shine up through oily film
    where river meets sea meets river.
    And I can track him in the sonar
    of dolphin, seal
    as if his pencil
    hit the sea floor
    echoing everywhere
    filling the sea’s room,
    unstringing the current’s loom
    in which warp
    and weft unravel
    into oscilloscoping wave.
5
    “He began to think of making
    a moving image
    of what never stops moving
    that would bring order
    to eternal being,
    and so make movement move
    according to number—which, of course, Socrates,
    is what we call time …
    And so he brought into being the Sun, the Moon,
    and five other stars, for Time must begin.
    These he called wanderers, and they stand guard
    over the numbers of time—and human beings are so forgetful,
    they don’t realize that time
    is really the wandering of these bodies.”
6
    An all-morning downpour shadowy
    as the stained insides of his coffee cup.
    He didn’t look up, didn’t talk,
    didn’t rush me to the car, but gave his head
    the slightest inclination.
    We sat while the news talked on and on,
    each of us glad to sink down into ourselves,
    to not have to speak: it was enough, more than enough
    to know the other knew we could settle
    in that silence, and no vow or spoken understanding
    would be as strong.
    And all we did as we sat there driving along
    was move from that point where everything originates
    until point to point the line we made together got drawn.
7
    The abandoned pit-house sliding down the cliff
    sliding into the sea
    is lost in fog
    wrapped around
    the headland’s scree—
    and in the mine’s undersea tunnel
    where miners walk out (along with my father’s father’s ghosts)
    a mile or more under the waves
    you can sense the old imperatives like played-out veins of tin
    shining up for the men
    walking briskly to their unsuspected
    deaths, while just above their heads, a moment before the cave-in,
    they can hear, as always, boulders rolling on the seafloor,
    a job of work to do before the next shift.
8
    “I am a dreaming & therefore
    an indolent man—.
    I am a starling self-incaged,
    and always in the Moult,
    and my whole Note is Tomorrow,
    & tomorrow, & tomorrow