The title: As of approximately February of this year, all readily accessible oilfields have been drilled.  Oil will become more and more expensive until it runs out.



The Oil Peaks

 

 

1

 

The dead are, as usual, fighting.  Some

believe they are superior

because they died, as they put it, “wild”

or in the wild – plane crashes, wars, volcanoes,

gunfire in hotel rooms far from home,

homeless – leaving little

or nothing to put into the ground;

the others had insurance and a stone.

Each side despises the other,

one viewed as rootless and anarchic,

the other as oppressive and elitist.

Each has its heroes – kings,

and those who went “up the chimney” –

and each its extremist groups.

They are the weather, storms are their campaigns,

but have no interest in the living

except as recruits;

and each expects final victory,

though history seems to favor

that side whose slogan is Freedom rather than Order.

 

2

 

Our Queen is an intelligent woman;

she won’t abide intellectuals.

Has turned political correctness

into an explicit and elaborate set

of taboos.  We can’t even

refer to the City cannibals

now making their way up the boulevard

as savages – only “the unhappy”;

we kill them, presumably, because we love them.

The golf course has been plowed –

our rations observe new sumptuary laws –

and anyone not off fighting

will walk behind a horse’s ass forever.

(Race horses unfit for plowing,

but they or their colts will learn.

The owners made good deals

and are now Her Majesty’s loyal barons.)

Our grand old suburb doesn’t look so bad.

It looks like one of those parties that got out of hand.

One wonders if houses are happier

when they burn to the ground, and nature

moves in quickly.

It’s the sort of thought that gets one

assigned to a forward unit

with the first of the new crossbows,

a turnip, and some rusty cans of fruit;

wondering when art will be needed;

thinking how nice people were,

at first, to *park,

and how the prevailing form

for a long time to come –

cars, corpses, turds –

will be oblong.

 

3

 

Hysteria is overload

(and perhaps best

seen as endemic, 

only occasionally overt).

But is the diagnosis, the news

item at last

intolerable, personal, real, really

too *large to grasp?  Isn’t it,

rather (all tears are

of frustration), too small

for vast, clumsy fingers

to hold, or even find?  That button

incapable of being undone.  That pearl.

 

4

 

Now that the gristly European angels

of “Wings of Desire” have decamped, we –

a we that has no I – alone 

care.  We too report

to an authority whose intentions

inspire little confidence: those men

who view our images, and point to one,

and blow it up, and file

a billion passersby for later judgment …

we are their eyes but see far more than they.

In an enormous mall, two friends 

or sisters (not immediately placed)

enter and move more slowly than the crowd,

because of age and because they are rapt.

That couch no husband will sit on;

that scarf whose colors match none they know,

being so much fairer; kitchenware

for unimaginable meals, bags

and perfume for no earthly cruise,

and toys for nephews long past innocence …

delight.  It scarcely matters

the girls buy nothing but a shared salad.

From level to level, floor to floor,

we pass them back and forth among ourselves

like a rumor of virtue.  Behind them

unruly children, abstractly mourned,

inappropriate, shout, bump, 

push, fight (a diversion), shoplift

and flee.  The obese, who have found

a way of being and buying enough,

amble in loving pairs

and gaze as if at neutral things.  Behind them 

dust fills the shelves, the brief

vitality of mold the food court;

the fabrics blanch and fray; the glass,

dispersed like seed, returns to sand;

and night for us comes on like bankruptcy ...  

Sometimes, from our discreet

positions, looking back and forth, we see

each other; sometimes

at the end of an arc we pause

to hold each other in our view.  

If a human could bear another’s eye

that long, we ask ourselves, would it mean love?

 

5

 

I alone am responsible for everything.

Was cruel, in her last days, to Mother.

Vain.  Stagnated

for years.  Freeloaded.

Wasted paper and water.  Therefore I accept,

willingly, abuse

from those who gather round me in the gloom –

protected from them only by the convention,

increasingly threadbare, that confession,

manly and obsessive, disarms.

The former pensioner.  The cop in rags.

That shockingly white, big-bellied child.

With nothing better to do and no more convenient

scapegoat within crawling distance,

they toss at me their final garbage, time:

our millennium, that clientless prostitute.

They are so loud and mutually deaf

that as guilt runs out

I find I can shout

anything at them.  Poetry.

How dull they are and want to be.

How a repeated spike

appeared on the scopes at the VLA

the day before their power was cut;

insuring that, through the long and sour

normality before us, I will never

receive the alibi I counted on.

 

6

 

The Secretary of Energy is meeting

with former and future colleagues.

And because they are as competent as trains,

most of the conversation is about football,

wives, and, laughingly,

the animals obstructionists

are brandishing like totems at this project:

the ringtailed beaverbob.  The sticklebear.

The migrant horny snake.  The short-haired widow.

Necessity need not be mentioned, only

obeyed.  What remains

is to talk to someone at Interior

and then … he shrugs.  The legislative shrug.

Thereafter lunch, then family and dinner

and, because he is on the team,

prayer.  The Secretary

tries very seriously

to think of Jesus as a man, not merely

the ultimate source of all power;

and sees Him, and speaks with Him, and rises refreshed.

 

7

 

New Year’s.  The first of the New Snows

after the first of the Great Heats.

All afternoon the stationary sirens.

But a little thing like all this

won’t keep the people from Times Square,

even if they have to go on skis

or roped together through the tunnels.

I’m reading Brathwaite: *That moment 

of utter disaster, the very moment 

when it seems almost hopeless, too difficult to

proceed, you begin to glimpse 

a kind of radiance on the other end 

of the maelstrom*; which heartens me,

and in my notebook I begin to think

how to broadcast that fact to the world,

to hearten it.  Of course we won’t go out.

New page, thinking I’ll write

about my love, but she wants to see 

the ball drop.  Maybe stop

at *Jarhead’s or *Commando’s, and find

that our friends who didn’t invite us

invited no one else, but gathered there …

we’ll drink to the New Year and radiance.

But to open all those locks – ?

On our shelves, the ceramic vase

has the shape of the cooling tower

of a nuclear plant; the Mayan

ballplayer appears to have lost (or won).

The big abstract has suddenly

resolved into a tear;

even Bach is intolerable …

So, no more art.  We’ll go out

into a crush so great

that bombers setting themselves off will feel

a new, sardonic life

emerge from shards of flesh and steel,

awareness descend like snow,

their god dissolve in puddles.

The heatstruck of last summer

will clasp, like leathered Westerners, the cool

firm hands of those who froze tonight.

And as the crowd cries TEN … NINE … EIGHT

the cups of all the beggars

will fill with everything it has to give. 

Brownouts will strobe the towers; signs

will dim a while but then return in glory,

the newsboards urging us to suffer

only that fear in which we all must live.