Children of Men

28Feb07

She sends a picture of them before the ruins, and the sudden scent
of Cumberland Island and an earthy desolation ascends, and time folds.

The world with a great desperation and violence becomes chaos,
becomes senseless laws and murders, becomes televised laughter,

becomes a riding mower, becomes an Escalade, becomes Sunday service,
a snake swallowing its tail, a gagging forward.

Can what is foreseen change the foreseer? Can the car sliding across ice
toward the irresistible tree be crushed only in the future?

Three children hug him, and the world is as light as their small bodies,
a butterfly painted on her cheek brushes his mouth. Earlier

an orchestra swelled and paused, eight dancers drew toward a center
and paused and listened before their attention became motion.

He lost his job after someone found nude photos on his computer,
taken and sent to him by his fourteen year old student — his wife became pregnant,

he will not be forgiven. He reads: I love you with what in me has no head or body,
lumbering without understanding myself or the love you’ve lent me.

The fear of eye contact and much more touch, the fear of
children thinking of oral sex. The reality of no god, the fear of pointlessness,

a room with no walls and no echo. At the edge of the sky he says,
crying, when will it end? And she, at the edge of the sky,

at the lip of the earth, doesn’t know what he means…
is he running from or waiting for that end

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