The they it almost always is
          want to catapult obsolete delivery trucks, elastic plastics,
any extra modern &c into the atmosphere's faults,

the they whose blueprints and schematics whirligig
          so beautifully and fatally
through the softer parts becoming lately late.

                              Lately I am desiring my god-effect
          but I fear I have had already my god-effect,

a squeak, click, brush of air so someone has the sense of being kissed
          or whispered intensely to just before they woke.
Just as a toe makes a delicious curve

in the saturated sand before the wilderness of the sea,
          so we move in the air of this world
which will cover the dent we made when we leave.

                              O, our fortress is on five kinds of fire
          but until such expirations as we make

should we not move forward at a keening kneel
          of course already? yes quite thank you here
take my hand. Fin. Should we not advance

much celebrant in the throes of nothing
          as in the fantasias of love, budging, stuttering,
gainsaying the fearful knives sketching into the vitalia?

                              Sure. Convince me. I say the knives are fearful
          which is why they are sharp.

Today men who were once
          boys mottling backyards with firecrackers, boys
with equations starring their eyeglasses,

who calculated the vectors of forces diverse
          even being pushed down stairs
are saying Save the world! via

                              the shooting of stuff into the stratosphere.
          Half a world and 17 degrees of hunger away

a detective soldiery rifles the graveyard
          of a despot's toy box and discovers
a yet-to-be-assembled supergun. At this stage

it is unweird for a dolphin to shimmy loose
          from the approved blossoms
bedecking the mini-mall

                              at the edge of a deep, dark wood.
          Now we are certain

we have made too much mention of light,
          now we know we will never be able
to have mentioned it enough.

A poison glides severely
          from each motion we make.
Nothing has ever been this good.

                              How else paint the world
          but with devouring fire, how else live

                                        but running with rickshaws full of ice?
                    and as one swift and elegant, moving

under the impossible, darling weight of an ocean.

__

There's always a "they." On NPR, I hear of a scientific "they" who propose to cool the earth by shooting chemical blurs into the stratosphere, technology is funny, belief is funny and of course they is really we, too. Once we all wore short pants or no pants. Horace said we shouldn't put a dolphin in the woods but what does he know about gunships lacing the skies above miles of mall parking lots? Still, he deserves a shout out. Can Art save us? Probably not, but it's one weapon in the arsenal that BANG! produces the effect of existential meaning, poetry's sonic, linguistic interpretations of the interior negotiation with sensory experience before history's tsunami. No take-backs! Terror before the miscues! but this is not the only apocalypse we've waded through. There's something about the finite that makes glisten so poignant. Charles Gunn: "When nothing you do matters, then all that matters is what you do." In the face of deletion, we clutter always the void. Beauty and despair, right? Even if that's setting yourself on fire in a Wal-mart parking lot or getting married in disguise in a stranger's back yard. Or writing a thank you note. You flush the firework to get the fountain. Too scared to love is scared enough to do more harm. Saddam Hussein had begun work on a supergun I hear on the radio and immediately think of an Itchy & Scratchy bit from The Simpsons and can't help but wonder if that's where he got the idea. In the midst of the greatest tragedies, people get hungry. We've gotten to the point where everything almost simultaneously is great and terrible: you dial up a rescue on your cellular telephone and a hive dessicates, the flowers furiously yearning. All we can do is all we can do. Moving can be moving, isn't that great? Only in Art can I put you or is that me? under the weight of an ocean, only in real life can you not fly beneath this weight or wave grenades into startled birds. At least not yet.