Canzone Basking in the Pre-Apocalypse

for Art Bell

He tells me, “Once in awhile things happen as they did in the beginning:

chemicals fuse into suns and planets, dirt swirls out of a mist. In times

like these, we all wait for change.” Once, years ago, fish grew legs and began

to creep along the shores. At this moment a different beginning,

according to the host on late night talk radio: it’s all quickening,

speeding toward the moment our end will begin.

Not for all, he reassures, just for eighty percent of us. He has begun

to make plans, he says, in the 3:00 a.m. dark. His desert

home stocked, water, cans of soup, a grocery invading the deserted

sand. I listen, muscles sinking into the sheets. I begin

to sleep in the early morning, dreaming so near sleep’s end

that my eyelids turn transparent and open before the dream ends.

I dream of my mother, dream a dream from her childhood: a river unending,

full of bodies floating facedown. Monkeys perch on the bodies, which are beginning

already to rot. The monkeys screech, pound their pebbly fists, pull the ends

of the long hair of the dead. They lift faces from the water, ending

their bloated sleep, waking them. My mother screams. One time,

when I was a child, she told me this dream. I want it to end.

Instead I dream: the monkeys, the river, the screeching. Nothing will end.

I see my mother on the shore. Her scream echoes. It quickens:

the bodies float faster, the monkeys screech louder, their fists fly, quickening

themselves into mallets. The dead, their drums. At once the pounding ends.

The river quiets. My mother quiets. Then she deserts

the shoreline, and I awake, alone. Again, the radio. The voice from the desert.

This time the voice is a caller who says she lives far from the desert

in the north. She knows nothing of sand and warms only at winter’s end.

They talk, after my dream, as they did during, about the future: the desert,

how he will be safer there. The aliens, how they will help the deserted

few, those of us who will remain. Their fear sings me to sleep. It began

months ago when he played a tape of a screaming sasquatch. I deserted

sleep, stayed up and listened, imagining the flat desert,

the host’s home, his neat cans of food and clean bottled water, time

zones away. Fluid and calm, his voice well timed,

the host calls us to call in. Wringing our hands and waiting out ends, we desert

our minds, cast bones, look to the skies for the quickening

signs. Listen. Will it sound like the monkeys, only closer, pounding more

quickly?

Will it be dark, fiery, fluid? Will it be silent? Questions quicken

my dreams. In the dark, someone answers a phone. The voice from the desert

hisses and pops. I hear the days left in the calendar quicken.

Skiing the empty trails with the dog whose feet are quick

to leave me behind, I notice the sky, billowing red, ending

the winter day early, peeling off seconds of light. Daylight is quick

to abandon us. Iced in red light, I stare. The dog notices, slows his quick

pace, stops, and stares at me, his own red sky. Nervous, he begins

to shift his feet, whine, calling me to come, but I am still, beginning

to freeze in the darkening air. I lean toward the quickly

deepening sky. Will it split, rain spacecraft and wrath? My breath times

the seconds until the sun sets. I settle my mind. Music on the snow, my poles

beat out sharp time.

I think I am too easily influenced, crazy, obsessed, touched, even mad. Sometimes,

I hear the minutes crunching by. Evenly at first, then quickening

into the voices, the smooth bass of the host, the crackling phone lines. At times

I imagine the gray empty of after, but then I find we are all up late, timing

the minutes. Every compass pointing south toward the desert

in the early dawn, we wait for destruction. Paranoia seasoned with ticking time,

soup boiled out of story and dread. Even we will burn off in time.

No radio. No host. No callers. Until then worry without end,

but Jesus will stand us up. No aliens will appear. The end

is actually anywhere but near. I know, but I listen all the time,

to a man taking calls, and arguing about the beginning

of the end. Believing nothing, I breathe, begin

to see that once in a while things do happen as they did in the beginning:

fear swirls out of the mist, forms suns and planets. Without us, time

looks at his watch and brushes past, and shuffling, then running, years quicken

past our doors. I need the man with the microphone in the desert,

his mad timbre, troubled dreams, because I, unlike time, will end.