And The World Is a Resilience of Hopes. And a Darkness as Well.
by Michael Blumenthal
“I will do nothing more to night tonight.”
Dan Chiasson, “One”
No one who has ever watched the sky for very long, with its
remarkable changes and its sweet little cacophonies of moods,
can help but know that tomorrow’s weather, in all likelihood,
will bear little resemblance to today’s, it will merely do its best
to humor us, keep us off guard, send us back and forth to our closets
for, first, a parka, then a wool sweater, then (damn it!) an umbrella
and the one thing that can truly be relied on is the unpredictability
of everything: susurrus and noise, thunderclaps and horrific heat,
inclemency and cure. Every channel you surf towards will provide
a different prognostication: Willard the Weatherman may smile
and act like a moron, but deep in his hip pocket, like a cable
from Baghdad, the bad news is waiting for us: low pressure areas
from the North, fault lines waiting to crack open in Asia, swirling
cones of tornadoes descending on us in Kansas. We can pray all
we want: the chemistry of currents and frontal systems has its own
logic. Only the birds, migrating and perambulating, know for sure
what uplift or downdraft awaits us, and even they are keeping it
to themselves, advocates of a Darwinian order. Keep all this under
your hat, if you are wiser than I am: You never know when you
might need it, and the person hurrying for the boat in front of you
could easily have been tripped up with a little withholding, he too
could have been dragged into the undertow, and not even the Pope,
in bed with the flu, could have saved him, no corpus deum for him,
no magic syllables, just rain and inclemency and a ladder to the stars.
Copyright © 2008 by Michael Blumenthal.
This poem is part of AND, poems by Michael Blumenthal, to appear with BOA Editions in 2009.