Apocalypse In F-Major

When I die, do you know what I’ll see? Sudden, radiating brilliance: the astronomy tower’s weight before it fell. Rolls of shimmering heatwaves, the courtyard cracking under its own opportunistic shove - that first messianic second of uplifted brick, of foundations uprooted. And then nothing else at all.

Picture this: the shattering of Edison bulbs, the Jeffersonian ideal flung across the Great Divide and piled high like duct tape and solo cups.

Lord, I never could hate those scientists, or the makers of war. I tried so hard to confound their loving promises, to reject their computations; on days when the wind blew its many-fragmented pollens I would wish them ill. But I could never hate, no matter what path their glory set upon us When I die, flashes of auburn hair like turbine engines. Leaves in their decomposing grace. 

And have you forgotten yet? Could any of us forget waking up for a second time in that blastbaked November warmth, the leaves crisped into sidewalk stones? 

   In the years that came after the whispers condensed:

   Were you alone? Or with your friends?

   I was in the library when it fell.

   Who else saw the woods alight like robins redbreast in song?

   What can you recall?

And have you forgotten yet? 

Those were the days that I couldn’t speak except in love. Those were the months when the sight of red sweaters would send me into panic, a whole year where the weeks were sucked out like thermobaric booms, like long-stemmed herbs draped between the purling knots of scarves. In the nighttimes we took ourselves apart for the thrill of being undone, the shock of becoming alone again. And through it all the mountain stayed above, pristine in the ways it had always known. 

We climbed it one spring, all boot-laced eyelashes and plastic love. Lights broke on the glaciers; lupines grew higher and higher. I followed after you, unseeing. You crept over stones, unfelt. When I fell to my knees in an ancient riverbed you stopped and counted strata, one semester of geology put to its highest use as mercurochrome. You counted backwards into the rising waters and I stood on tiptoes to catch a glimpse of your voice above the waves. And then, when I had again grown tall, we set out into the diminishing pines: lovers of the closing road. 

But that was not the end of our loving and losing in the strands of deepest time. My darling, why don’t you remember?

You were from the highlands, from the hourglass of the soft-quilted countrysides, and I was alone by the ocean shores. Those ocean shores of soft grass and the seashells arising, where I arose into a tired boy who would leave for the mountains. 

The ocean shores are made of glass now, the highlands burning like watchfires. 

When first I took wing and flew from my home by the seas to the brick buildings where we met I was ailing and unforgiven. You were ailing and unforgiven. And we lived in a world which shivered to its core with each turn of the slow-passing sun. We were happy. Other souls shouted serenity from the rooftops and we found a smaller patch of forever in the holding of our hands. Each morning when I kissed you, ten thousand million neutrons licked at our lips with each passing second, and yet my lips were as close to yours as I knew they never could be. Separated by the atoms of the universe though we were, there was little in the whirling of galaxies as close as your cheek beneath my own.

Your cheek beneath my own grows cold now. I shake the sleep from my eyes, laugh a while in the folds of the forest green. Haven’t we been this cold forever? Were we not once on a planet full of grief? Some of us believed it our re-beginning. 

There is nothing new under the sun, not then and not now. Shockwaves lifted us up and set us back down, and it was nothing new. Waters awash in smoke called out to the mountains in the battered voice of the once-missing come home. Our friends and loved ones grew sick, and died, and we were nothing more than the cycle of the rain and snow made whole, made alive. Your skin was silent, your breaths remained a multitude of stars salting the violent sky. So we all grew silent, some of us more quickly than others. 

Have you forgotten yet? 

I sleep in the valley of your shadows, shadowed over by mountains so grand. Here among the threadbare leaves have I reshaped my lips to your name, like the coastline hollowed out into the Sound. I seek out the meadowgrass, seek comfrey. I put my lips down to the cool, clear water and pray for the Earth turned inside out, for the desolation of America as it scattered amongst the lilies. 

Picture this: children’s parks and photographs. Alleyways and almanacs. The indecipherable mournings of seagulls and kittiwakes, like the city lights calling you soft and low. 

We belonged to a city once. We belonged to a fair few, belonged to ponderosa whispers and the scent of jasmine heated summers. We belonged to them like they had raised us, for in a way they had, and we belonged to the cities where we loved and to the cities we never saw. 

Once, when we were young, we loved in the same city and never spoke a word. You with your hair like silhouetted autumn, me in the dark of the city’s heat. 

We are young now, and will be forever still, and where I walked along the matted gravel of the river’s arms you followed only days apart, never knowing those sidewalks were where we kissed each other through and through. 

There is so much silence now, so much that I wish could be kept unsaid. And have you forgotten yet?

Flashes of auburn hair like turbine engines. 

Leaves in their decomposing grace.