By 2100

Was it that—a sense and beyond intelligence?

Could the future rest on a sense and be beyond

Intelligence?

On what does the present rest?

-Wallace Stevens, 1947

The distress is mine.

As to our troops returning, I have no news—

news to report if I got wind of it—

nor have I public business to propose;

only my need, and the trouble of my house—

The troubles.

-Homer, The Odyssey

… in the clear noon light

now as then

our eyes may rest

the primal world is still

only the sun burns

and the expanding moment

we know those ancient watchers

beneath the hill

-Frances Horovitz, 1970

As global heating oscillates, one signal among many of the accelerating bio-collapse, imagine: By 2100. Or, ease into it, By 2030?  By 2050? Or, Bye and bye in 2100…

Imagine: On what does the present rest?

CODA

The sea doesn't change as the earth changes;

It doesn't lie.

You ask the sea, what can you promise me

And it speaks the truth; it says erasure.

-Louise Glück, 2009

Tule Lake/Lava Beds photos Douglas Beauchamp 21st c. Click to enlarge

NOTES

-Wallace Stevens,from the poem The Pure Good of Theory, in Transport of Summer, 1947.

-Homer. The Odyssey, from Book II A Hero’s Son Awakens. trans. Robert Fitzgerald

(Homer tells when Telémakhos entered into the room, the grey-eyed “Athena lavished on him a sunlit grace that held the eye of the multitude.”)

-Frances Horovitz, from the poem Dunskeig (Hill of the Fort), in The High Tower, 1970 (and Collected Poems, 1985, Bloodaxe Books UK)

-Louise Glück. from the poem March, in A village life, 2009.