No day is right for the apocalypse, if you ask a housewife in Talking Rock,
Georgia, or maybe Hop River,
Connecticut.
She is opening a plastic bag.
A grotesque parody of the primeval muck starts oozing out.
And behold, the plastic bag is magic; there is no closing it.
Soap in unsoftened water, sewage, asbestos coiled like vermicelli,
Masonite shavings, a liquefied lifetime subscription to The New York Times delivered all at once.
Empty body stockings, limp, forlorn, like collapsed lungs.
A blithering slur of face creams, an army of photocopies travelling on its stomach of acronyms, tooth paste tubes wrung rigid and dry.
Also, two hundred and one tons of crumpled bumpers wrapped in insurance claims, slag, coal dust, plastic trimmings, industrial excrementa.
Lake Erie is returning our gifts. At first she thought she had won something.
Now it slithers through the house, out windows, down the street, spreading everywhere but heading, mostly, west.
Maybe heading is the wrong word, implying shape and choice.
It took the shape of the landscape it rippled across like the last blanket.
And it went west because the way lay open once again: not the same fecund rug the earth grew when white people scraped their first paths to the Pacific across the waves of the inland grasses.
Outside Ravenswood,
West Virginia, abandoned cars shine in the sun like beetlebacks.
The ore it took to make the iron it took to make the steel it took to make the cars, that ore would remember the glaciers if it could.
Now comes another grinding, but not— thanks to our new techniques—so slow.
The amiable cars wait stilly in their pasture.
Three Edsels forage in the southeast corner like bishops of a ruined church.
There are Fords and Dodges, a Mercury on blocks, four Darts and a Pierce Arrow, a choir of silenced Chevrolets.
And, showing their lapsed trademarks and proud grilles to a new westward expansion, two Hudsons, a
Salle and a
Soto. I was hoping to describe the colors of this industrial autumn— rust, a faded purple like the dusty skin of a Concord grape, flaking moss- green paint with primer peeking blandly through, the garish macho reds insurance companies punish, the greys (opaque) and silvers (bright), the snob colors (e.g.
British Racing Green), the two-tone combinations time will spurn like roadkill (1957: pink and grey), cornflower blue, naval blue, royal blue, stark blue, true blue, the blacker blue the diver sees beneath him when he plumbs thirty feet— but now they are all covered, rolling and churning in the last accident, like bubbles in lava.
And now my Cincinnati—the hills above the river, the lawn that drained toward Ricwood Ave. like a small valley of uncles, the sultry river musk that slid like a compromising note through my bedroom window— and indeed all Cincinnati seethes.
The vats at Proctor & Gamble cease their slick congealing, and my beloved birthplace is but another whorl of dirt.
Up north near Lebanon and Troy and Rosewood, the corn I skulked in as a boy lays back its ears like a shamed dog.
Hair along the sow’s spine rises.
The Holstein pivots his massive head toward where the barn stood; the spreading stain he sees is his new owner.
What we imagined was the fire-storm, or, failing that, the glacier.
Or we hoped we’d get off easy, losing only California.
With the seismologists and mystics we say the last California ridge crumble into the ocean.
And we were read with elegies:
O California, sportswear and defense contracts, gasses that induce deference, high school girls with their own cars, we wanted to love you without pain.
O California, when you were moored to us like a vast splinter of melon, like a huge and garish gondola, then we were happier, although we showed it by easy contempt.
But now you are lost at sea, your cargo of mudslides and Chardonnays lost, the prints of the old movies lost, the thick unlighted candles of the redwoods snuffed in advance.
On the ocean floor they lie like hands of a broken clock.
O California, here we come, quoting Ecclesiastes, ruinous with self-knowledge.
Meanwhile, because the muck won’t stop for lamentation,
Kansas succumbs.
Drawn down by anklets of
DT, the jayhawk circles lower and lower while the sludge moils and crests.
Now we are about to lose our voices we remember that tomorrow is our echo.
O the old songs, the good days: bad faith and civil disobedience, sloppy scholarship and tooth decay.
Now the age of footnotes is ours.
Ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid.
While the rivers thickened and fish rose like vomit, the students of water stamped each fish with its death date.
Don’t let a chance like this go by, they thought, though it went by as everything went by—towers of water flecked by a confetti of topsoil, clucked tongues, smug prayers.
What we paid too much for and too little attention to, our very lives, all jumbled now and far too big in aggregate to understand or mourn, goes by, and all our eloquence places its weight on the spare word goodbye.
