This is the entire poem,
Solutions for the End of the World,
including the seventh and last section.
If you've been reading the poem this week,
jump to the end to read the last section.
Individual
sections with commentary
(sometimes
more cryptic than the poem -
but
oh well) can be found below:
Section
1 can be found here.
Section
2 can be found here.
Section
3 can be found here.
Section
4 can be found here.
Section
5 can be found here.
Section
6 can be found here.
Solutions
for the
End of the World
Not everything that is faced
can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
James Baldwin
The certitude that there is
no salvation is a form of salvation, in fact is salvation.
Starting from here, one might
organize our own life as well as construct a philosophy of history: the
insoluble as solution, as the only way out.
E.M. Cioran
1.
Introduction of Fear, The Appearance of Goya
& A Feathered Eel
The
sun, insoluble,
rises over the eastern ridge.
Shadow, mist;
everything indistinct,
unknowable as the cracked-glass patterns
of plutonium-soaked ooze through
salt cave-walls near Carlsbad,
as
it falls, drop by drop,
into deeper waters. I turn on the tap.
Particles drift,
tiny last cries in the substrate,
the dream-aquifer,
where final solutions float by…
I splash my face, insoluble.
Since
the 80s, the rate of ice loss has
increased six-fold. Organs
in my body lift,
anticipate the fall – terror
in my heart, stomach, spleen,
as they float up, while the body
plummets.
I drift
out the window: a warship; a cabbage moth;
a
cluster bomb with its enticing
colorful toys, drawing
children in;
a yellowjacket spinning
around a dead cicada.
Indistinct
forms merge;
solute and solvent exchange souls.
Goya appears near the
ceiling, insoluble.
He is his own
uncomputable function.
And
so he is wearing a pair of plastic batwings.
He smiles.
He says he could make a
sketch of me,
sitting on the bed, head in hands,
foolishly
trying to solve the equation of the earth and the human soul.
He will call it “The
Joke.” Caprichos.
Organs float, bodies
turn in the surf. Last year, 40%
of
honey-bee colonies in the US died.
And I watch water disappear
down the drain, unused, wasted,
into a realm of Precambrian fracture-rock,
where
a Feathered Eel swims, forever
on the verge of devouring the world.
2. The Appearance of Maria
Prophetissa,
The First Alchemist,
The First Alchemist,
& Goya’s Rebuttal to
This Poem
Maria grinds
cinnabar with vinegar in a copper mortar with a copper
pestle,
produces
living particles
of Mercury,
quicksilver thoughts active within
inert matter.
Alexandria,
3rd century before Christ,
before the library
fire,
before
the last mammoth ghost disappeared,
before the ocean’s
shadow emerged from the ocean…
She makes the solution:
Lunar Mantis mixed with Green Dragon mixed
with Raven Eyes
mixed
with Quicksilver,
who moves between
worlds, unites them
(by thought, by imagination, by stealth).
The solution boils in a glass vessel over flame. She
places
salt in the fire, and the
quicksilver turns, spins,
insoluble.
She sees forms, ink-like clouds, merge,
green through blue, the incandescent green of Mercury’s eyes
(witness to how everything is dead before
it’s even appeared),
consciousness and matter one…
The city of Chennai in Tamil Nadu runs
dry.
The shape in the
solution spirals around the vessel’s edge:
bone-grey of cremation,
blood-tinged;
orange daylily sunset speckled with black
drops;
flash
of mushroom light, mycelium
radiating out, beneath all thought;
and an Eel, sprouting crystal lattice feathers, takes
shape inside the vessel,
begins its spin,
prophet and prophesy enfolded in one form,
on the edge of satisfying its hunger,
insoluble.
Europe
heatwave: record high of 45C expected in France.
Goya still flaps near the ceiling:
“You want narrative? Something
easily marketable?
A pithy ending about what we can
control and what we can’t,
that ties all images and emotions together? A
reality show
of Omega eating Alpha’s tail?”
An underworld flower erupts, yellow lava sifts down a
red-black petal,
a house shakes into flame, grind of predator
stone
against
predator stone;
velvet-black blind-eyes dusted with mica
watch the sky fall, glass
shards in slow-motion.
Tectonic
plates
beneath the Eel’s feathers shift, churn the newly dead
back to life for a second, two seconds…
Wildfires
ravage the Arctic…Entertainment value of the end,
insoluble.
Goya again:
“I
forgot to mock hope!
What is this hope we all demand from the
end,
whenever
we sneak a thought toward the future?
Do
you think hope is the solution bubbling in the alchemist’s cellar;
green,
blue, iridescent violet…
hope
is the nuclear countdown clock that no longer works.”
3.
The
Alchemist Tries to Understand What She Sees…
And Then Remembers…
And Then Remembers…
Maria
stares at the shadow in the vessel,
sucks in a breath, startled. What is
this?
Catastrophically widespread
die-offs of many creatures could be inevitable
if human activities
continue to lead to more acid oceans…
Is this what it’s like
to have a heart without
a
future, insoluble?
No future and so past
erased, insoluble?
The wind, the sun, the rain,
insoluble?
Goya laughs:
“Increasing temperature frequently
improves the solubility of a solute.
A paradox. What did she expect?”
Maria Prophetissa, Daughter
of Plato, wanders
out of the Alexandrian Gate of The Sun, down
to the harbor, image of the Eel
inside her eyes,
insoluble.
Melting permafrost from global
heating has made it easier for locals to
retrieve the remains of woolly mammoths…and
sell them on to China,
where the ivory
is fashioned into jewelry…
She sees the Pharos
lighthouse across the harbor.
As a girl, she stood
on this same strand, focused
on the sea –
how the sea-breeze lifted the boiled sun off
blown sand –
and knew that something would eventually rise out of the
green expanse
because that expanse was too great for there
not to be something as vast beneath –
the shadow of the sea –
and she would rise to
greet it, terrified…
In the past year, an area the size of 500,000 soccer fields has been
destroyed in the Amazon.
Nearly half a billion trees torn down…
She knows the shadow of the sea is the sea;
and that the sea’s shadow
is the shadow of the sea in the
eye staring into the face of the sea –
fish among ruins, cycle of desire,
anemones enfolding tiny darting
creatures into its body deep in the sea’s
rubble.
The calls of fishermen merge with the call of
gulls.
(The gulls, the black-backed gulls…cursed with one drop of blood
on
their beak –
first taste of life and so, first taste of death –
blood burned onto all their beaks by the
sea’s shadow,
insoluble.
Siren-red,
a red scream, mirrors the gull’s appetite,
how they
lift the shell into the clear blue, drop it
against rocks,
offerings to the sea-shadow,
white-winged
extensions of the shadow of the sea,
insoluble.)
Goya shakes his head:
“This part
of the poem is shit! An alchemist
who sees the
great Eel devouring the world in the future?
A character who has the
long view? Are you saying you
have the long view?”
She
draws
the sign of Mercury in the sand, envelops that sign
with a circle that is
the sign of the Feathered Eel, eating
its own tail,
and waits for it to
rise from the sea.
More
than 200 reindeer have
died of starvation on
the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard,
with scientists blaming their deaths
on climate change.
Goya laughs again:
“This is absurd,
magical thinking,
invoking imaginary beasts to
understand the true beast,
the beast right in front of you…”
Tomorrow’s world will not just
be hungrier:
it
will increasingly face undernutrition. More carbon dioxide
means
harvests with lower protein…
4.
In
Which Goya Tells Me About Birds
and I Tell Him About Seeing A Feather from The Eel
Fall from The Sky
and I Tell Him About Seeing A Feather from The Eel
Fall from The Sky
“I remember wings,
so many wings,” Goya says.
Global heating to
inflict more droughts on Africa as well as floods.
“When was the last
time you saw and heard a massive flock?” He says.
“A flock so vast
that when they
turned in unison, the earth below responded?
So vast that branches
rose to meet them.
So vast that grass
spun up toward the sound, just to be close,
just to be loved
by that sound…”
Ecosystems across
Australia are collapsing under climate change.
I saw a black
feather fall from the sky yesterday, I say.
“I was speaking
about reality,” Goya says.
It was all black,
with a touch of white at the stem, I say.
“Silence,” Goya
says.
It spun, changed
into a black tooth, a black knife, and landed
beyond the coyote
fence.
“Silence, please,”
he says.
I found it in
chamisa branches…a feather fallen from the Eel,
passing overhead.
A new analysis warns that "global
warming may have played a pivotal
role" in the recent
rise of a multidrug-resistant
fungal superbug.
5.
The Feathered Eel Gives Maria Prophetissa
The Idea
for the First Alchemical Formula
Maria the Prophet bends down,
touches
the flank of a fish, shriveled in sand.
She
stares into the empty socket where the eye used to be.
Less than 30 vaquita remain in the wild.
Sand
lice like stars spin inside the body,
between
delicate rib bones, cradle of emptiness, the emptiness
from which everything comes –
the
one.
Less than 25 vaquita remain
in the wild.
She
breaks off a rib bone, raises it, closes her eyes.
Bone against sun, stone against
water, fishermen against gulls,
sea-shadow
against sea, the furious conflict of opposites –
and so, two.
Less than 20 vaquita remain in the wild.
She
sees the fishbone merge with the sun –
and the great Eel emerges out of the sea, shadow across sky.
She watches it eat scour the city.
Egyptian,
Greek, Roman,
filtered through savage teeth. The Eel eats
the wounds, the scars,
the dead, devouring
children and so the children’s children…
She
sees. Accepts. Says:
“It’s going to devour the world, it’s going to
devour the wounds.
It’s
going to devour the world, it’s going to devour the wounds.
The world, the wounds; the wounds,
the world…”
The
Eel plunges back into the sea, dissolves into a gull cry.
“Silence,” Goya says.
And she knows
the Eel is the three –
the union of opposites. And in this union,
four is achieved.
Wholeness.
Less
than 15 vaquita remain in the wild.
“One
become two,” she says,
“and two becomes three…
and out of the third comes the
one that is the fourth.”
Words spoken into the sun, into the mouth of
a dead fish,
into the sky, into the furious eye
of the Eel, maw open.
Her solution.
“Silence!” Goya shouts.
Less
than 10 vaquita remain.
6.
Silence, Begging for Silence, But…
Maria has returned to earth.
Goya
flapped into the sky.
Wind
batters the screens.
Tree-damaging pests pose
‘devastating’ threat to 40% of US forests.
I
wake from a recurring nightmare, body flushed with fear:
a
wall of ice
stretched
hundreds or thousands of miles in both directions,
on a vast plain of sand, coarse
grass.
I am supposed to meet someone out there…
Insoluble.
Outside:
figures,
vague shadows. Cassiopeia, close. Black
hollyhocks move towards me.
Dark pinyons pull away.
As many as 30 to 50 percent of the
planet's species may be extinct by 2050…
And
the Eel whispers into my ear:
“There
is a short-horned lizard, sharp-scaled, with inter-
connected
shades of brown around a sleepy eye that opens
wide
to take me in, to survey canyons below the White Rim,
absorb
the Green River, while it clings to sandstone, red as
human
blood dried for centuries in the sun…and the rise and
fall
of its ribcage is the breath of the stone beside it, is the
breath
of the tides in Baja, further south. This is your
descendent…This
is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into
my ear:
“There
is an old man on the verge of death, or on the
verge
of crying for the first time since childhood, crouching
against
the back wall of a restaurant, smoking, downtown
Des
Moines; a wall that reminds him of his grandmother’s
hands
against his back – how she touched him, prodded
him,
protected him. Where is she now? Two deserts away,
many
deaths away, a place where a darkling beetle crosses
and
re-crosses an empty highway that may or may not lead
to Heaven.
This is your descendent…This is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into
my ear:
“There
is a spider-legged columbine, yellow pistil inside
pale
blue petals, that pulls the sphinx moth away from its
affair
with the moon, tongue unfurling down the long spur.
They
were once the same creature, split apart by the moon’s
pull.
Now insect and flower return to their origin, inside each
other,
for a second, tangled meat, building spires of cumulo-
nimbus
cloud – mist on mist, ghost of water rolling onto the
ghost
of water, climbing back towards the crescent moon –
symbiosis
of illusion and reality. Pollen-tongue, wing-sepal,
moon-mouth,
nectar-prey. This is your descendent…This is
your
ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into
my ear:
“There
is a white rhinoceros lying on its side, Ol Pejeta, Kenya,
last
breath released, and there is a man who crouches next
to
the rhino, witness to the last breath, heart-broken, his hand
on
the ground, feeling what is there, feeling what is no longer
there.
Sorrow moves in a slow circle around him, and the ghost
of his
loneliness slips into the heart of a woman waiting for a bus
on
Boulevard de Strasbourg, Toulouse, the morning of her first
day
of work in five years. She stretches out on the pavement,
theater
for passing cars, and the earth beneath opens, grateful,
takes
her heart into its mouth. This is your descendent…This
is
your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into
my ear:
“A
grey whale scrapes the ocean floor, ploughs through mud,
filters
amphipods through baleen with a two-ton tongue, filters
the
minds of seven children standing on the sand, Lincoln City,
Oregon.
Silt clouds catch the light and the crystal lattice interprets
the
sun – words from the first earth: silver from the rim of a click
beetle’s
faux-eyes, copper from the hypnotic stare of a cat-faced
spider’s
eyes as it wraps a grasshopper, taking its time – the love
embrace
of predator and prey. The whale blows a cloud of mist
and
the children reach into the sky. Drops land on waves, cupolas
driven
into black water, the place where the water exhales an
osprey,
two ospreys. A feather falls and the children rush forward,
toward
the water, toward the feather. This is your descendent…
This
is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into
my ear:
“A
black-backed gull just landed near a boy who has just tossed
a
beer bottle against a wall, Hamburg, Germany. His head is
drenched
with cortisol: mornings are sinister, afternoons are
sinister,
night is sinister. He sees things at the corner of his eye:
figures,
trolls, headless mammoths, giant bumblebees from his
dead
aunt’s garden, sonicating pollen off a flower, onto the bee’s
hair.
Bee-noise shifts matter across space! He laughs, says to
the
bird: ‘There is blood on your beak. Is it mine?’ This is your
descendent…This
is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into
my ear:
“There
are precise mountain shadows on the moon, cat paws
across
dust, imprints of what’s been lost, what can’t be returned;
a
child left behind in an abandoned train station, unable to move,
stuck
there for fifty years wondering why, why won’t they come
back
for me? And the wondering is the wind that moves through
the
grass grown through the cracks in concrete. This is your
descendent…This
is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into
my ear:
“There
is a sound, the sound of the sun, how it mimics a chorus
of
white-and-black striped bees, of wings that no one can see
for
speed; of wind that flows liquid from a squadron of flying
squid,
searching for the source of the sun. And there is a woman
in
a basket boat, looking down into the sun on water, off the coast
near
Lagi Village, Bin Thuan Province, who can hear the spin at
the
center of the sun’s reflection, how it desires to hide in skin,
in pine
needles, how it speaks through the antennae of long-horned
beetles
hiding in the dark. This is your descendent…This is your
ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into
my ear:
“There
is a reddish-black hollyhock, an underworld flower, on
4th
Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico, rooted between rabbit bone
and
moon-dust; yellow pollen cascades down the petal, burns
like
the center of Andromeda, burns the human heart almost
black,
the heart that is a house perpetually on fire. As the black
gristle
turns to ash, it drifts into the night sky, harvested by sand
wasps,
who collect the particles to feed their young. This is your
descendent…This
is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into
my ear:
“There
is a girl standing in front of her sister’s house, staring into
the
eyes of a devil’s flower praying mantis, outskirts of Dar Es
Salaam,
Tanzania. She reaches out and the mantis displays: red,
blue,
black, and purple patterns, trying to distract. She can feel
the
insect taking her in, all of her. She hears the voice inside the
sound
of passing cars, the voice beneath the talk through open
windows,
the voice of wind against wind. How can she hear wind
against
wind? She is suddenly strange to herself – and so discovers
herself
for the first time. This is your descendent…This is your
ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into
my ear:
“And
there is a woman, painting in her studio on Chihuahua Street,
Mexico
City. She ushers three Egyptian dog-sphinxes into the world,
the
ones who guard a temple somewhere between here and a star she
named
Syrious; the dog-sphinxes who keep vigil over a black-masked
dancer
that dances something instead of nothing into the world. The
realm
of earth and death rises through the artist’s legs, the realm of sky
and
solitude descends through the crown of her skull, merge in her heart,
give
birth to Andromeda – blue spiral, orange curves around darkness,
and
white light, light that feeds a black hole, the dark-center that sets
all
the galaxy’s stars into their spin. She puts brush to canvas, a cat in
her
lap, a cat on a nearby chair. The ghost of a cat floats above her,
the
ghost of a mammoth floats behind her, the ghost of a coelacanth
looks
in the window, and the ghost of the first kingfisher feather falls
through
the skylight – and she thinks: “Oh look, another strange form
has
entered the world.” This is your descendent…this is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into
my ear:
“There
are vicious glass-shard-inspired tentacles of a Portuguese
Man
O’ War shredding the face, neck and shoulders of a boy
swimming
in the Thai Gulf, South China Sea; tentacles that want to
be
close, to find another/themselves in the void; tentacles that leave
him
with a message of fire, of fire and skin, of salt and fire and skin,
of
salt and fire and skin and the future. And he opens his half-blind
eyes
on the stretcher as the nurse dabs his wounds, tells her the exact
moment
when she will die because he now knows the exact moment
he will
die. This is your descendent…this is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into
my ear:
“There
is a woman wandering her childhood neighborhood in the
rain,
Jacksonville, Florida, knocking on each door in succession,
leaving
before anyone answers. Soaked clothes cling to her skin,
her
nose runs, her head and hands shake from exposure. She feels
eyes
on her back, eyes from behind glass, in the dark. And there
are
also the eyes of the raindrops reflecting the grey sky; and
there
are also the eyes of the crows folded into a live oak tree
above
her, slow-blinking the day into and out of existence. This
is
your descendent…This is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into
my ear:
“There
is a corpse-burner, breaking a skull with a bamboo stick,
scarf
wrapped around his face head against pyre flames, Manikarnika
Ghat,
Varanasi. No one will touch him, this death-tender, smoke-faced,
and
so he has rejected touch. He knows the terrible poem the tourists
refuse
to hear; grease, blood, smell of shit. And
there is an Angler Fish,
ball organ dangling near its mouth, alight, drawing in the curious,
all
the dreams that have sifted down to the bottom,
transmitting the death
poem. And there is a bank
teller in Santiago, Chile, who wakes to
the
crack
of the skull, smell of burning flesh. She touches her cheek, feels
the
bone beneath, feels the trilobite fossil embedded in the bone. This
is
your descendent…This is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into
my ear:
“There
is a woman holding a juniper torch, resin-lit, scanning cave-
shadows,
waiting for the words in the stone to speak; waiting for the
animals
that speak to her constantly outside the cave to reveal them-
selves,
to name themselves: a horse face, the back of a cave hyena,
a
rhino lying on its side, all speaking through flickering shadows.
She
smears black, red ochre, yellow ochre and white, one into another,
follows
the curves, the seams, and so begins the world. Do you see?
Imagination
is a solid rock wall – how the dream and the fingers and
the
stone and the hyena’s eyes and the lizard heart are intertwined,
inseparable.
Do you see? The vision is a voice, brought to life by
torch
shadow, bound to the flame, bound to her. Do you see? Rock
as
dream incarnate, beginning the world, ending the world. This is
your
descendant…This is your ancestor…”
7. Maria’s Last Vision of the Feathered Eel
The Eel dives back into the sea
(the
unforgiving sea)
deep into fracture rock
(the
unforgiving rock)
through an underworld lake
(the
unforgiving lake)
past the elusive skin of the sea’s
shadow
(the
unforgiving skin)
spins across a shadow sea
(the
unforgiving wind)
and becomes the shadow of the shadow of the
sea
(the unforgiving sea)
There
is no coming back from disappearing coastlines.
She says: “Cleanser, destroyer.”
She says: “Healer, destroyer.”
She says: “Destroyer, destroyer.”
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