the wind assaults the autumn-ravaged trees, the pop stars are all dead,
and we’ve all assembled on this raft floating through these flooded streets
on our way to an undetermined paradise, we are the stragglers searching
for survivors in the shadow of plague, the gods’ most devastating promise
fulfilled, everyone said karma was tit for tat, but really, it’s this flood:
an accumulation of water, of crowded lives spilling their excess into wet
roadways: a muddy doll with a missing foot floats face up, a bobbing cabinet
plays peekaboo with soggy records and waterlogged bills, a buoyant couch
defies the flow, dyed a shocking chartreuse, it bounces audacious, indifferent
to the death hunched just beyond the cracked and shattered windows
that mirror back our retreat, taunt us with our jaundiced reflections,
in front of me is a mother holding an infant, she hasn’t seen her husband
since the night their television blitzed out, and she’s been singing the same
lullaby ever since, tura lura lural let’s wait for daddy with the milk,
but the streetwater filtered through a thermos will have to do until formula
can be found, the warmth of a mother’s breast until the bristle of a beard,
everyone still remembers how we used to hustle under the hum of the electric
grid, how there was comfort in the menial, the mundane, mere weeks ago,
but here we are at the end of the world, squeezed between inflated orange flaps,
asking ourselves how we got here: did we look away too long from the streaming
text on our television screens, did we waste our days confined to our bubbles
of labor and home, did we take for granted the assumption the world
would just continue, or did we forget to seek, to live for a purpose
higher than ourselves — what about love, will there be love where we’re going?
Click here to read Seth Leeper's compositional note on the poem.
Image: 221207083744 by Jesse James, licensed under CC 2.0.
- in search of the phantom city - October 31, 2023