THE ENDS OF THE WORLD

3 4 Y T H E E N D S O F T H E W O R L D C H A S E T W I C H E L L When planes bound for Europe take o√ late at night flying due east, their sound comes to me as wind in deep winter, slanting the snow in the empty woods, forming bright scars, ridges of drift. Then I wake in the tropics’ air-conditioned chill. Dream wind, where has it gone? The sound of falling air, the ticking sleet? In that world, snow-diamonds scatter on the roads, picked out by headlights . . . When some grief overtakes me, my mind flees north to the clear-crashing brooks, sun and shucked-o√ ice, seeds splitting in the compost. It was real. I lived there when any moving water was safe to drink. Oh, never mind. I’m just drifting into yet another elegy. Look, here come some jet-skis, gunning up to the public boat launch. 3 5 R In this world, the mango sky silhouettes the glass and steel aspirations of our kind, then weakens over the towers, the derricks and cargo ships. We’re going to lose everything. Just look at the guttering back of the bay, and all that flees from it – grand wound festering – what a sunset! Even the mango’s abandoning the sky, hitching a final ride on the clouds’ undersides. At first I raged at a single soda bottle aloft on a see-through wave. Raged and raged. Now I no longer want to see the illusion of the ocean intact, the not-blue not-green water breaking open and closing again, restless above its heart of garbage, the frothing white sucking edge depositing a toothbrush, flip-flop, bald head of a doll, and the usual deflated jellyfish of condoms, cigarette filters still intact after who knows how long at sea, a vast and senseless migration – inedible, immortal, everywhere. Part of me wants to see the city gone entirely dark, glittering tableau extinguished, nothing but a ruin, 3 6 Y a colorless permanent shadow inhabiting the empty streets. A yacht is docking, back-flushing its engines. The crew wraps heavy ropes around the pilings. How hard I fall out of sleep, out of a vision of the earth restored. I open my eyes in the dark, and find myself back in the Garden of Earthly Delights, naked again among stingers and fangs, extinct and future creatures, all of us unnamed and equal under the only sky. But art can’t resurrect it. It only dreams it. It hands a drunk an empty bottle. ...