Read a micro-conversation with the author here.
It’s difficult to care, much, for so much death.
Look, my whole side aches, more than
all the days I have should engender. But,
here I am in this fried air and the melody
is Beyoncé and in an hour it will be time
to go do this job that nobody cares for.
Not the manatee whose flesh was razored
open by a cheap boat’s propeller.
What ruin! It’s amazing the sea exists at all.
That in it are any radiant fish. I want
to apologize to them but what a stupid thing.
The other night in the news were
images of birds dying in a sick heap.
Dead in feathered circles
atop black, wet sand and island rock,
and watching the footage I thought
how the filmmakers obey a Prime Directive,
of sorts. Saving nothing. Never
interfering. No injections that glow and gloss.
I was this morning singing
an old song from a past life
in which I was alarming and vast
and my politics were just
depressing, and since then,
since the raw dawn and its sad hymn,
I’m wondering why any of us keep on.
Out on the warm ocean
there is an island of plastic refuse
that is the size of Texas,
and that fact is way beyond anything that feels real.
My favorite show was cancelled.
Nobody was watching.
Besides me. I glowed before it like a mirror.
I woke up thinking about
dead lawyers and scarred antagonists
and what it means to invest
one’s whole heart in a fiction.
I am telling you the truth. I am telling you a secret.
A holy thing. A spell.
A password. I love you. Knock knock. Who is still there?
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