THE UNCREATION

The crowd at the ballpark sing, the cantor sings

Kol Nidre, and the equipment in our cars

Fills them with singing voices while we drive.

When the warlord hears his enemy is dead,

He sings his praises. The old men sang a song

And we protesters sang a song against them,

Like teams of children in a singing game;

And at the great convention all they did

They punctuated with a song: our breath

Which is an element and so a quarter

Of all creation, heated and thrown out

With all the body’s force to shake our ears.

Everything said has its little secret song,

Strained higher and lower as talking we sing all day,

The sentences turned and tinted by the body:

A tune of certain pitch for questions, a tune

For that was not a question, a tune for was it,

The little tunes of begging, of coolness, of scolding.

The Mudheads dance in their adobe masks

From house to house, and sing at each the misdeeds

Of the small children inside. And we must take you,

They sing, Now we must take you, Now we must take

You back to the house of Mud. But then the parents

With presents for the Mudheads in their arms

Come singing each child’s name, and buy him back:

Forgive him, give him back, we’ll give you presents.

And the prancing Mudheads take the bribes, and sing.

I make a feeble song up while I work,

And sometimes even machines may chant or jingle

Some lyrical accident that takes its place

In the great excess of song that coats the world.

But after the flood the bland Immortals will come

As holy tourists to our sunken world,

To slide like sunbeams down shimmering layers of blue:

Artemis, Gog, Priapus, Jehovah and Baal,

With faces calmer than when we gave them names,

Walking our underwater streets where bones

And houses bloom fantastic spurts of coral,

Until they find our books. The pages softened

To a dense immobile pulp between the covers

Will rise at their touch in swelling plumes like smoke,

With a faint black gas of ink among the swirls,

And the golden beings shaping their mouths like bells

Will impel their breath against the weight of ocean

To sing us into the cold regard of water.

A girl sang dancing once, and shook her hair.

A young man fasting to have a powerful dream

Sang as he cut his body, to please a spirit.

But the Gods will sing entirely, the towering spumes

Dissolving around their faces will be the incense

Of their old anonymity restored

In a choral blast audible in the clouds,

An immense vibration that presses the very fish,

So through her mighty grin the whale will sing

To keep from bursting, and the tingling krill

Will sing in her jaws, the whole cold salty world

Humming oblation to what our mouths once made.