Parsing Endings and Beginnings

World’s end conflated with mine inspires urgency.

Our epochal crisis emergent, stuck to my shoe

like the gum Sam, making his mark,

spat into the parking lot and then stepped on

as we walked back after the art cinema.

Plath’s dead bell, a call to action, not resignation or indulgence.

While some redouble their prayers or drown in

reality television, shopping, or sports talk radio,

I’m lashed to the mast, like Ahab. Resignation spins me

not to voluptuary escape, but towards purposeful

engagement manifest  in ecological tax plans,

Green Citizens’ Fire Brigade manifestoes on the

Climate Crisis, renewable electric grid plans,

electric car confabulations with Pentti, global sustainable

incubators with Earth University, on and on.

Time for love, but not the dedicated pursuit of

pleasure, those endless seventies diversions, a

return to scoring one  hit shit to cast highlights

upon serial romance, another tangle of arms, legs,

and  torsos in strange permutations, tongues in places

that they never said was OK. Or exploring

morphine ecstasies, floating painlessly in wonder,

or, more my style, discovering the courage to

run first that river in the Kalimantan highlands,

outpost beyond civilization, away from loggers,

television and T-shirts, a generation or so removed

from taking heads. Or writing that book long planned

on the Patriots, or major league scouting,

the kids sternly and earnestly reincarnating my own boy dream.

Why not relax when my closest brush  as my heart skipped beats and

my head slumped to the steering wheel as I braked and darkness, not unfriendly, gathered from outside and the light dimmed and  two thoughts came: This is it,  and then, Its not so bad. Then I returned. Snapped awake after a nod toward

the infinite. Now I can appreciate the old dervish in the Sufi movie lying down to die, on what he called his wedding night with eternity.

My experience gave me at least on recurring occasional  intervals of retrospective peace, but not the wisdom of a Buddhist  parsing and finally severing,

or at least placing on the ground, the chain bonding wish and  want.

Instead, the urgency to grasp the lever of

            emergent necessity  attempting to alter by words,

plans and risings from the commons the self-destructive

climate trajectory and sad feedback unleashed  by our civilization’s effluents,

artifact and foundation of our lives of ease and virtue.

Making peace with the planet in extremis, world saver aspiring

posterity rescuer, making improbable commitments, necessity

spun alchemy turning to useful purpose aspirations, an ego turn,

the imperative to leave a trace, a record, a testament, a sign,

a fossil beyond my bones that I was here, my uniqueness thrashing

to help preserve civilization, or what passes for it,

useful consonance between want and sacrifice,

serving as footstool for high mindedness, so that there’d be generations uncounted to appreciate on the great eternal Internet or what comes next my existence, pathos, essence, je ne sais qua. For even if we could reconstitute

a Roy from DNA resequenced, regrown from a stray skin cell,

and enlivened with all the information and memory

from the data banks, that new Roy would be not my Roy,

but a better Roy, less complusive, less given

to inappropriately, appropriately breaking into bad song,

paradoxically world saver,  wielder of  Morrison humor.

Both me and not me. Another. Much less me than Sam, who is

really both me and not me, by propinquity, not just by history and heredity.

Anyway, curiosity leavens dedication.

Now, climate crisis conflated and desire churned into declamations,  books, articles, plans for electric plug in vehicles, parking lot PV, renewables sea to sea.

Renewable hedges sold and proselytized. More, more, more; must; must; must.

My arrow and time’s arrow, the parabolas aligned in flight. I  feast on a great tradition of catastrophe, of endings, return, of Messiah’s true and false, of journeys home, recovering childhood fireman games on the  day camp fire truck, being second in command, journeys to the promised land, toward her, away from her, towards the light, Joyce’s carnival, lights blinking and beckoning with plangent desire drawing me on, the lights tantalizingly close, caressing my fingers and then moving away,

like lovers fallen asleep and then exploding from the bed, remembering this is not where I want to be  found in the morning.

What was the passion of a few becomes the defining reality of the many.

Emergence, not a spectator sport, means that aroused we become part of  the change, the global  rhythm of  ecosphere  toward sustainability, for continuity in response to all influences. We and me imbricated in the  life-force  in motion, as the great gray wave of history rolls on with or without the human comedy, but a sea spiced with the intuition that somehow, someway we,  the eternalized striving, laughing we will still be a part of it all.

Poetry