Eschatology

A fortnight
is but the lull between paychecks,
the family vacation’s patiently
collected days, maybe
to some the loss of
forty three names for lichens or
another’s recipes
for tree root alchemy.

Over that span somewhere
instinctual knowledge of the river’s
fluid mechanics, a herd’s migration
unwritten, goes missing
afar, isolated
or conquered
as the lost knot language.

One more phrase has dropped
golden and wrinkled, withered;
the gods who brought rain
no longer called upon,
their names cease to be relevant
now, those limbs bare
come spring.

Worn stone inscriptions,
pass the lips of the last
remaining elder
whose world was shaped by this
dying grammar, these breathing
vaults filled with knowing turned
to bide time as artifacts

by the young, who learn
like Dacians, Mahicans, Huns
the tongue of another;
the tongue that promises
work, new life, new phrases
to define a world, a universe
a missing afterlife

while whole galaxies collapse
in the failed hunt, the bad harvest
in that final breath
of the ultimate speaker
the echo,
the silence,
the vacuum on the 15th day


(updated 10/28/08)