It starts small. First, maybe you fail to notice the blue
azalea bush that has been remarkable on the last corner
of your evening walk for thirteen years. And so it isn’t
there. Then it’s that stretch of new housing out
by the airport that up and leaves the map as if a wash
of bleach were bleeding in from the west. One day,
when you’re not looking, one Indonesian island blinks out
and triggers a cascade through the other seventeen
thousand like a strand of Christmas tree lights going dark.
By the time you look around, continents are calving-off entire
countries, which maybe join Atlantis in the Mariana
Trench and pick up where they left off or, more likely, turn
as barren and white as Great Barrier coral or the pods
of belugas which, by the way, are no longer punting about
in the Arctic, their melons having gone missing, along with
the sea ice and, while we’re at it, the sea. What’s left,
at this point, is a solitary cistern of clear water, inexorably
evaporating, leaving bathtub rings in the red desert rock,
as it goes. Still, if you cup your hands around your eyes,
shutting out everything else, if you peer deeply into the dark
water, refusing to avert your eyes, as if their lives depended
on it, or yours, you can see your grandchildren there, chasing
a dog on a narrow islet of grass, oblivious to the truth that dawns
on you at last, how they are all that is left of the world.
azalea bush that has been remarkable on the last corner
of your evening walk for thirteen years. And so it isn’t
there. Then it’s that stretch of new housing out
by the airport that up and leaves the map as if a wash
of bleach were bleeding in from the west. One day,
when you’re not looking, one Indonesian island blinks out
and triggers a cascade through the other seventeen
thousand like a strand of Christmas tree lights going dark.
By the time you look around, continents are calving-off entire
countries, which maybe join Atlantis in the Mariana
Trench and pick up where they left off or, more likely, turn
as barren and white as Great Barrier coral or the pods
of belugas which, by the way, are no longer punting about
in the Arctic, their melons having gone missing, along with
the sea ice and, while we’re at it, the sea. What’s left,
at this point, is a solitary cistern of clear water, inexorably
evaporating, leaving bathtub rings in the red desert rock,
as it goes. Still, if you cup your hands around your eyes,
shutting out everything else, if you peer deeply into the dark
water, refusing to avert your eyes, as if their lives depended
on it, or yours, you can see your grandchildren there, chasing
a dog on a narrow islet of grass, oblivious to the truth that dawns
on you at last, how they are all that is left of the world.
(first published in American Literary Review, 2018)
