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.