Hereafter
- Hereafter
When men end streams and makeartificial lakes, the bottoms
are blank and featurelessand so we sink crashed cars into them
to give fish a place to live.I’d like to say that’s beneficent.
And, so too, that ice melt, the sea rising,will have a beauty, a solution, in it.
Imagine all the swimming then,in the wrecks filed on the freeways.
An idyll of engines stopped utterly.No notion that a next life
is above the one hereto ever be had. Not even the halos
of opalescent motor oilmaking the motion of ascending away. [End Page 127]
ROSE McLARNEY’s collections of poems are Its Day Being Gone, from Penguin Books—winner of the National Poetry Series—and The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, from Four Way Books. Rose has been awarded fellowships by the MacDowell Colony and Bread Loaf. Currently, she is assistant professor of creative writing at Auburn University and coeditor in chief of the Southern Humanities Review.
