Another Green World
after a painting by Nicole Eisenman (and an album by Brian Eno)
This city is the same one I once knew
its garrulous buildings and Art Deco spires
splintering into skies of Prussian blue.
All things must flow. In two centuries, who
will recall these clinquant crystal towers,
this city? Is it the same one I once knew:
hustle-bustle, razzle-dazzle, frou-frou,
hemmed in by rivers and telephone wires,
aspiring into skies of Prussian blue?
A forest-world of glass and concrete flew
upwards ‒ grounded by crashes and flash fires.
This city is the same one I once knew
when youth’s audacious trust bloomed bold and true
before the slow servitude of the years
tempered it beneath skies of Prussian blue
dissolving, frame by fuzzy frame, from view.
Our destinies are mapped to our desires.
This city? It’s the same one I once knew
senescing into skies of Prussian blue.
* * * * *
Wild
Some bone in you still smolders, twitching wild
each time a shadow flickers or a bird
takes flight, alights. The trees here are on fire
with life. Today it was the neighbors’ ruddy
tomcat lapping water from a cistern
of glistening terracotta. Minutes passed
without a quiver in your muscles, eyes
reduced to pinpoints, marbled apertures.
Perhaps you were just curious, envious
at that cat’s primal state. Hopelessly trapped
in our puzzling domestic universe
of countertops and toilet seats, throw pillows,
odoriferous human clothes, what room
is left for wildness? Can processed tuna
compete with the evolutionary grit
of tearing flesh from still-convulsing limbs?
It took millennia to tweak your genes,
domesticate the goddess in your soul
to make you ‒ in a word ‒ companionable
as fine statuary. Each room you dwell in
becomes a Louvre of ruthless vanity,
plush dark chamber of alien secrecy.
You stretch and galaxies unravel. Paw
and tail assess the gravitational pull
of a windowsill. To jump, or not to jump?
That is the question in your mind right now.
Three billion years of evolution meow.