I Was Called Back

I was called back into the dark during an early morning flyover     onto a rusty mauve plain     fields overrun with a low river of tar     the smell of burning grass carried from the east     flowing upward through neon bright signs of pharmaceuticals and snow     a bronze liquid of promise a fleeting and always-ending sleep     the remains of chipped concrete eating away the foundations of every building     tables of salt rising over the whole country     I was called onto a platform in the north     a miles- wide outpost     where I sat     waiting to hear what new harm my sisters had conjured     they reached me by phone     through a star or their dreams     a breaking request from our father that had traveled through a long and oily channel     I could understand its beauty     the rainbow-thick shimmer of pigment and poison     a seeping fissure of love     before  the apocalypse     the ruin     or just the overhanging clouds     yesterday a maker of brine and sauerkraut told me the world would end by corrosion and decay     I’m not so sure     I hear the eruption between refusal and insistence     or maybe just a truck   driving through 

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“Images of disintegration and decay have been appearing everywhere in my dreams. Not only of late, through our quarantines, but for years. The violent neglect of people and neighborhoods, the virulent racism, the decimation of the environment, and the rusting through of bridges in Cleveland where I grew up. I am ever more suspicious of the artist’s perch and the impulse to document any veneer of beauty without acknowledging the explosion that continues to brew with a ferocity that will not be contained.”
—Samuel Ace