Things Fall Apart
James Maher
The return trip always takes forever
through stubble of mountains woods
and swamps or corn without end
I tire of the train’s windows and the
camera’s lens Cows in the pasture scratch
on fences The sun sets hastily
in black and white but I can’t
sleep The tracks are straight as
God’s spine I look at history books
and study a map of the Roman Empire at its
highest tide and I remember hearing
how the living now outnumber the
dead here in America we can
outvote them The train comes to the
end of the line and enters a tunnel
and at the other end a few stars
come out: beasts that held past
and future under white paws until
expanding telescopes dismantled them bone
by bone leaving us only one frontier:
the peaks and canyons in the hemispheres
of our own heads And to spite
all the expedition and X rays
all the wagon trains and group therapies
at best we’re still crouched in a cave
passing myth by firelight and watching
our shadows swoon against the walls
*
So did the world from the first hour decay
though we have tried to bind it
with the sticky blood of slain lambs
with alchemical compounds mud pies
glue-all The centre cannot hold We
take
gravity for granted ever since the apple’s
fall we have forgotten how to
appease it we have forgotten to
believe in the moment it will let us
go We are living in the old age
of the world rocks are gummed down
to beaches the folds of the earth relax
The air is gray with snow we scent it
and begin to run to clothe our lives
in rudiments to follow the paths of
water finding always a lower
level we sleep by the mouths of
rivers The ocean fills every space
*
Things go crazy at the end of every
millennium In the year 999
there was a sharp rise in churchgoing
witch-hunting confession conversion:
packs of Huns driven into the Danube for
baptism Today I turn on the radio and
get nothing but static at every frequency
the sound of rain wind snow This
is today’s weather report God is
cranking His voice toward a pitch My dog
paws his ears and whines I strain
to think about eternity: static This
is a journey I’m not ready for This
is the return I know I’ll forget
something I fall asleep and dream:
I lean from the Twentieth Century as from
a great tower and watch all of skittery
civilization from Pinocchio to Cain
and everywhere snow is falling on the round
fleecy Earth as God gathers his aeons of
breath makes a wish and hunkers down