in front of, behind

To take flight then is to strike against the flint of genius

an iceberg hard and coarse enough to start a fire

to write in sugar-soaked chalk a last letter to her

on a blackboard buried in layers of touch and smell

and sight –  since it’s you who are gone already

and the world who lags, who will later catch you up.

When the pages of your new books no longer bend

and the objects you take for modern are sold at curio auctions

and the oceans are too acidic to swim in, perhaps to live in

and one of your lungs was conceived in a white room somewhere

and we've sat on or lived in or burned all the lungs of the earth 

and the perfumes that drive you to madness are worn by old women

and old men mad with aloneness and pity so bitter, so wretched

for all the good they thought they could do in the world, but couldn’t

because the world was always behind them, because being is past

and now even the past has passed them, then you’ll see it

for the first and final time – two cacti in a desert standing off, shadowed 

figures wilting at opposite points of the waterless, numb horizon.

But you’re young, warm-blooded, one of the cohort of leaves

prodigiously keeping a bag on the pavement from sight

the cold wind blows around, uplifting that greenish polymer

the cold wind blows around, uplifting those leaves that give chase

the cold wind blows around, uplifting that jumbo jet

the cold wind blusters through that jumbo jet’s firing propellers.