Poetry

L. S. Asekoff

One Minute Before Midnight

Faced with the "great American incognitum,"
Wisps of background radiation so preposterously faint
They're less than the energy of a falling snowflake,
A hundred Hiroshimas in a cell,
We're still in the Dark Ages.
Just drop a net down & see what comes up:
34,000 hockey gloves, pastel organelles,
Galaxies of scattered salt —
All of human history in one hand.
Still, when cryptozoa enter the picture,
& everything is read through the spirit glass,
The whys & wherefores escape us.
Not "Is this true?" but "Is this crazy enough?"
Wandering rocks, cloud atlas, wave mechanics
Offer their strange charms.
A clunderthap! & it's "Three quarks for Mustar Mark!"
Between cataclysms above, eructations below,
Life clings to its perilous perch.
At the knife-edge of extinction,
"The city waiting to die" drifts on its giant lily pads into the ice-age night.