Here is the corrected version. Sorry for the added annoying meteorite... - H
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ONE EVENING (EARLY SPRING)
1
Late afternoon. I walk down Morris Avenue.
A blustery March wind hurries the clouds along
below a slate-blue sky. The dome comes into view.
It sits atop a sturdy synagogue, six sides strong.
Just then (suddenly) the sun breaks through -
the dome's half-sphere glows - warm ruby-golden
radiant expanding bubble - vital, alien.
Floats there, whispering - *I will overturn you.*
2
What if a comet tore through the atmosphere
today - smashed into Earth - a heavy sledgehammer
with one blow blotting out all, all we have here -
life, the human race, everything - gone forever?
This poem among the first to go into nothingness,
along with all other poems, all songs, all works of art,
everything built - bridges, those silos on red alert,
all cities, houses, races, histories - all drop to dust -
3
and suddenly national destinies come to an end,
and rivalries between peoples, states, companies, authors,
and the agony of becoming great, powerful, rich, grand,
and the monotonous jockeying to get the better of others,
and all the wayward labyrinths of love and desire,
all broken hearts, all longings and disappointments,
all the ideals of the whole earth, all hopes and sentiments,
all dramas, cries for justice - all this. No more.
4
But ghosts will remain. A ghost still walks.
A faint, unseen, unrecognized spirit
flits by ruins (a pile of radioactive rocks)
of the synagogue... *and enters it.*
Now the unseen has become - invisible.
Shadow, the shadow of a shadowy reflection.
*Walk through yourself,* I hear a voice beckon.
A seashore voice (papyrus) sighs. Waves nibble.
5
By the seashore, where the immense waves
address their manuscripts to the infinite sand
and roll, and scroll, thundering over the hives
of monastic hermit crabs fiddling the undetermined
panoply of Aphrodite (genetrix of these curving
clusters of honeyed birth, droning into mindless
cosmic sleep beneath an anonymous caress)... and
far off, into air, dolphins - shuddering, dance - arcing...
6
I have walked, sighing, through myself. To the end.
Through the earth, to the end of the earth,
to the end of myself, to the end of the end.
The lost world, broken vows... all become earth,
at the end. The heavy stone flung from the sky
cracks against a larger stone (both broken).
You see the interstices (increasing, creasing again,
dividing, dividing again). One stone. A dying galaxy.
7
Around the synagogue in the evening light
the house cluster in their modest drab integrity.
Walking through their vocations (under blight
of a voracious contracting whirlpool city)
the humble continue... gathering on holiday
outside the bronze double doors of their temples.
The writer (an unnoticed bystander) crumples
a scrap of crosshatched paper and throws it away.
And the wind lifts a corner of the scribbled page,
not yet finished with the end of the universe.
Over the brilliant dome a small cloud of rage
disguises the sun - cries: *I will immerse
in tears - I will burn with fire - I will erase*...
(- pretending once more deep within heaven
not only to destroy all creation and then
again rebuild the whole cracked edifice
but to do all this in the manner of a scribe
with one hand at his aching brow and one eye
peering at a mossbound, moldy parchment -)
and *Lord, we have deserved your diatribe.
The parched earth groans for a comet's finality.*
Your mortified heart stretches through space and
swelling spreads (ubiquitous) the fiery ointment
of your love, of your forgiveness, of your peace.
3.26.97
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