some of us think we’ll close the deal tonight
when we fire up a doomsday machine in France
and atoms open up
and let themselves go
and maybe we’ll all burst open with them;

or maybe it will come ten years from now,
or twenty, when we drown in our own waste;
or maybe when the earth finally opens its gates
and sends another flood to pull us down;
if we close the deal that way we may be wet with more than tears.

one thing is true: when we close the deal the sky will be blue,
surviving birds will sing, remaining animals will chuckle
in their furry throats, cockroaches will stretch
and slap each other on the backs even as we turn toward each other
and try to decide if it will be worth living one more day

if we have to slit the throats of children right then to gain it,
or will we decide instead to stroke their hair and tell them
that all the promises we made about making a better world
were just like drawing knives across their necks? will they
beg us to kill them before we close the deal?

when we close the deal (and maybe, just maybe, we already have)
will we still wonder how it happened, or will we take one moment
to recognize how we failed? or will we take that moment to lie one more time
and turn to the ones standing beside us, trembling before the awesome End,
and say, “I’m sure it will all come out right”?

Len says there’s a sea of garbage
in the central Pacific.
Seal pups
on the beaches there
play with tampon applicators,
swallow them,
are blocked up
and then die.

Just above us
on the beach
is a dead sea bird.
I’ll say it’s a gull because
it’s the only sea bird
I know by name.
It’s probably
as soft as it looks,

but I won’t touch it.
Death needs
to be kept
at arm’s length,
just beyond
my fingertips.
It needs to stay out there,
far away from here.

There’s no need for me to know what killed that bird.
I’ll walk the beach, pick up smooth stones,
flip the flat ones
over the surface of the water
two, three, maybe five times
until they sink at last
to safety on the bottom,
where I can imagine

they’ll rest on clean sand,
no plastic there
among the scallops
and the horseshoe crabs
that will live forever on the bottom
of the perfect harbor
that shines and ripples today
with the slight breeze that heralds an approaching storm,

glad we made it to the island
ahead of the wind and the rain
and that we may sleep through it tonight
and get up tomorrow and read poems
to smiling faces on the bluff above
the beach, the gull, the stones,
the sand full of white shards
I will not speak of again.