To See the Earth Before the End of the World

AT THE TOP OF THE CHAIN

152 AT THE TOP OF THE CHAIN The wild geese that floated to the ground down their river of air dip their heads into the grass, though the black bubbles of their necks suggest a surface risen, a froth from their landing, swallowing them. Like them, nothing seems clean anymore. Whether the sicknesses of cash or the earth dying, green shit all over everything. Too many geese, too many people live in too many places unsuited for the body of their gross activity; and the idea of making place like home takes the clothes off someplace else, like logging takes the wood and kills the root that held another place in place. It’s clear in that photograph from space there is only so much place on the earth for us, no place else to go, the rest is space: that difference, a limit stark as life -and-death was before this shot’s perspective. The sight, a sci-fi alien view, but true; and true there’s never been any invader who wasn’t we whose traits we made alien in what we’ve done somewhere to ourselves. A screen full of ships from ’cross oceans of space come to take us slaves, their bug-eyed profit jones, their multiple arms for gimmee, their color— in our mirrors. The flash flood of a life form from elsewhere in the human universe, is us, we land. The innocently plaintive song of geese is all about us even as we taxi their runway chalked on our walk among them through the park. So large mannered have our movements grown that all the earth is as if too short a runway for each step, for geese who stay their migration 153 where we keep the cut of grasses packaged the most convenient for them, for wild coyotes in Chicago who walk into McDonalds fast, shock the counter, get food. We can’t say why we don’t call this a robbery, it’s so city slick for an animal, we see the folktales have their basis after all. The disingenuously plaintive songs of geese pass it on. The song is “Needmore have harm a many man.” where having nothing wears a proper name even though its line admits, “I need a shirt/ to get up out the dirt” to put something on its name. Coyote re-invents his world by breaking and entering rules: coyote rules! Read the headlines. We think that all the crows do is make noise because a shadow is not evidence even cast through light on film, but something clearly says, “Move over.” Nothing new, we’ve said it to ourselves. How do we not and break our own rule, reset the how much of things how who is one? One person, one species, one world to know enough. The blues knows weather and clothes have to fit, and that fit is a place a highway keys open for it. But when the roads themselves flap like the tarps over the few goods those fleeing can cart on them, destination come loose from an end— what would enough be wearing in this weather? If, like the sage, we find him in the road, where could enough carry a clean change? Or do we meet enough as no more, as resigned among the exhausted, finished and finishing any fill of every cup with smashing things up. . . . or in the ruts of the fleeing, do furrows appear? ...