Environmental Impact Statement

Not even light escapes a frozen star,

our first name, and flawed, for what tonight

we might open beneath the mountains,

crash-testing fragments of the instant after

creation to glimpse a grammar,

a language I won’t understand.

Blind, Milton had his daughters read to him

in languages they didn’t speak,

gave them the lines he’d night-gardened

all morning, the imagined mechanics

of Lucifer’s crow-dive into the dead’s river.

After taking dictation, his daughters

left the house to sell, volume

by volume, his library for groceries, scents.

What happens when my imagination

opens up inside someone else’s body—

the city’s morning light an environmental

impact statement for when she doesn’t

come home last night. I make coffee

and don’t look at my phone.

Walk the Ramble through the affairs

of starlings someone unleashed in the garden,

the new world. Ridiculous

to say we should have known better.

Each bird’s a painting of some dark thing.

Even if we tear a black hole in the mountains

it’d die pretty quick, probably.

And Eden is just an old man’s imagination

surrounded by bored daughters

with tastes for the fine things of this world.