Civilization

                       October 2017

as in Boston
as what it looks like
when you leave it

taking off
your undercoat
of smog

as if from inside
the gumball machine
at the top of the old
control tower at Logan

from when we built airports
and thought they could stay
half the globe away
the President expostulates and is

no longer followed by
his opposite number his doom
his ghost his
Little Rocket Man

I’m not the man you think
I am at home
I am not he

nonetheless I wish to leave
this message for
civilization thanks
for everything

for feijoas also known
as pineapple guavas
multiple names
for all the best things

for Cesar Franck’s violin
sonata for fanfiction for
the next
generation (literally the kids)

where nobody should have
to start from scratch
to start over

as if coming from
deep space anyway it feels
like we almost made it
as one later singer 

managed to say
even if
we are not
going to be okay

Image: “ Gold Spots” by Matt McGee , licensed under CC 2.0

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Stephanie Burt

Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard and author of three poetry collections, Belmont, Parallel Play, and Popular Music, and several collections of critical works. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other works include Advice from the Lights; The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them; The Art of the Sonnet; Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler; The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry; Parallel Play: Poems; Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden; and Randall Jarrell and His Age. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and the Boston Review.

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