Going Up and Coming Down

My creatures are arriving and departing lately

here to fore and fore to here more in each other’s

transport than in that to which they had before resorted:

ships, or dreams of ships, that docked into a pier for which

some human being’s poetry would serve as gangplank.

But poems lately have been splintering into a perilously

unavailing state: creatures slip through cracks and drown.

They no longer know what lies beyond our human gate,

what’s going up or coming down. Healthy fear appears

to be their motive force – which spawns a greater viability:

to gain direct control of their mobility, for which there is

no more reliable recourse than the deployment of their limbs,

or climbing up another’s limbs to be embraced by somebody

akin, with whose intention breathing passenger and living

means of transport can align. They walk: a sign whose gist

I get. They see our human world as losing every bet it places –

undermining duties of attaining and sustaining beauty’s graces,

choosing to forget where they were going or have gone.

This won’t beget a dawn my creatures feel like taking on,

and so they stroll autonomously now, and leave our creaky

leaking suicidal ships to us. What a tempting rhyme –

to write they might consider switching to the bus.

But that, to them, as recourse, is as fully ominous.

They won’t do what we do to fly through air or drive on roads

or sail in water. Each bespeaks great danger to the soul.

Art is slated for its slaughter – a fate, unless they find a way

around it, which awaits its every son and daughter.

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