2:36 pm
two children waken say they’re mine
like a thief I try to pocket
my apocalypse scenes
the children want the world
and I assure them they can have it
I just have to find my sunglasses
can’t see the planet anymore without them
but someone has sat on my only pair
the children say it was me
and why wouldn’t it be naked-eyed
I reel them into the brightness
3:14 pm
we reach a green
a place to mock-race over fake grass
forget the hem of fences
till it stops us
in a stream once
I pressed on wet leaves
my foot sunk into a dead deer underneath
no way to know
till my foot was in its ribs
how the hidden would get hold of me
4:03 pm
I find a tree cower beneath it
consider how much of the lonely
I lived along that creek was meanness
people spitting tobacco
into library books setting fire
to the gas-soaked nest of a bird
we drove past the forest more
than we entered it hoping against
the dart of an animal larger than our fathers
people crashed that way a bear emerging
ravenous after the snow
7:10 pm
I surrender declare the sun irrelevant
pull the shades against it let the tub run
till it warms while someone else’s child
stares thirsty at a dirty cup while the lakes
of Ohio while I align all these inanimate eyes
touch the plush arms of a stuffed cat as if
it were holy
this goat and Paddington without which
my beloveds refuse to sleep
7:41 pm
Before the reckoning I suck in
some Twitter and filtered air
then descend to them reenter the heat
and they are there writhing
the blind gods of the compost bin
who multiply so divinely
and who I have dreamed of
wriggling inside me worming
their acropolis into my softer parts
as they unmake me
I waken unredeemed
###
Idra Novey is the author of the novel Ways To Disappear. Her poetry collection Exit, Civilian was selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series.
“O Earth: An Estrangement in Five Parts” originally appeared in FIGHT (TLR, Spring 2016)