To See the Earth Before the End of the World
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- To See the Earth Before the End of the World*
People are grabbing at the chance to seethe earth before the end of the world,the world's death piece by piece each longer than we.
Some endings of the world overlap our livedtime, skidding for generationsto the crash scene of specie extinction,
the five minutes it takes for the plane to fall,the mile ago it takes to stop the train,the small bay to coast the liner into the ground,
the title-line of nations until the land dies,the continent uninhabitable.That very subtlety of time between
large and smallMedia note people chasing glaciersin retreat up their valleys and the speed…
watched ice was speed made invisible,now—it's days, and a few feet further away,a subtle collapse of time between large
and our small human extinction.If I have a tableat this event, mine bears an ice sculpture.
Of whatever it is it lasts as long as thatdoes until it disappears into its polar whiteand melts and the ground beneath it, into vapor, [End Page 638]
into air. All that once chased us and wechased to a balance chasing back, tooth for spear,knife for claw, locks us in this grip we just now see our own lives taken bytaking them out. Hunting the bear,we hunt the glacier with the changes come of that choice. [End Page 639]
Ed Roberson is Distinguished Artist in Residence at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He is author of eight books of poetry: The New Wing of the Labyrinth (Singing Horse Press, 2009), City Eclogue (Atelos, 2006), Atmosphere Conditions (Sun & Moon Press, 2000; winner of the 2000 National Poetry Award), Just In / Word of Navigational Challenges: New and Selected Poems (Talisman House, 1998), Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In (University of Iowa Press, 1995; winner of the 1994 Iowa Poetry Prize), Lucid Interval as Integral Music (University of Iowa Press, 1995; winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize), Etai-Eken (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), and When Thy King Is a Boy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970). In 2008, he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
Footnotes
* "To See the Earth Before the End of the World" will be published in Ed Roberson's forthcoming volume of poetry, To See the Earth Before the End of the World (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2010). Printed with permission from Wesleyan University Press.
