WHEN THE TRACT HOUSES ARE GONE

When the last of the tract houses is gone

along with the freeways, the traffic

and all the televisions,

we will struggle to recall

the ubiquity of plastic

the way the soft, transparent sheen of Saran Wrap erased our fingerprints.




We will recall without fondness

or the slightest nostalgia

our heedlessness:

the suffocated fish

the strangled birds

the dizzying extinctions,

how we threw everything away.

Everything.

Until Life insisted

we reclaim

our tenderness,

and our humility

slowly returned

as we fell

into the waiting arms of gratitude.




At first we will reach

for our cell phones and car keys.

Oh, the cars!

We will have to

squint our eyes

and think hard

about the times

when asphalt was normal,

and gates

and guns

between us.




We will tell our great

great great great

grandchildren

that those bits

of rubble,

those shards

of broken glass still scattered

among the tall trees

were once

what we called

skyscrapers.

(We will hear the distant ping

of an arriving elevator

and the whisper

of mirrored doors closing.)

We will smile down at

their astonished faces and say, Yes,

I lived in that sad time

when violence was the answer

no matter the question.




We will proclaim to the elephants

and the corpses

exactly how we cast the spell

of destruction. But we will refuse

to utter its incantations.

We will speak instead the alchemical

mother tongue

of restoration:

threatened to thriving

extinct to ecstatic

shattered to shimmering.




We will find ourselves

stopping

several times a day to wonder

at the miracles

of silence and open ground,

the vastness

of unbroken forests

and water flowing

uninterrupted

un-coerced

undefiled.




We will see the moon

and remember

our longing.