Dark Matter

In the name  
of everything supposedly holy

I feed the birds, which amounts to
now and then feeding as well

one of the neighborhood’s
outdoor cats.

The birds land, grateful but wary,
on the suet I’ve hung, never staying long;

how they ground themselves to peck 
the fallen seeds, staying for even less time

as the cats across the street lurk,
hoping to snatch the unconcerned.

My every well meant act
carries at least a little death with it.

This is true for all of us.
We don’t usually see it;

no one sees our scythes
as we slice through

existence: rare earth miners
dead for our phones; field workers’

cancers caused by the chemicals
keeping our lettuce crisp;

an unmasked breath passing
its bleak viral load onto another

who passes it onto another;
and somewhere along that chain

a link fails and falls,
and we made it happen.

I will keep feeding the birds.
The neighborhood cats will keep watch

and I’ll knock on the window
to chase them away when I can.

There are those who are saying
this is the time of the Holy Reset

and I acknowledge that something allegedly holy
is happening among us all today

as we pause for a long moment
to try and not be killers today.

Do you really believe it will make us think
about not being killers tomorrow?

Warning: when the man
finally apprehends
the full weight of all his sins,
he will explode and taint all.

When the extent of his damage
becomes apparent to him,
there will be such a storm of aftermath
that it will redefine the word.

It shall not be driven by guilt
but by the all-encompassing understanding
of how vast it was, how impossible to escape
for anyone, how central he had been

without even knowing his role,
having long contended his weakness
made him secondary even as he primaried
and centered himself. But right now

the burst has not yet happened.
He stands sure of himself
for one last moment before that.
More and more of us

see what’s coming,
but it’s too late; 
there’s no safe place to move.
All we can do is cover up and wait.

As we disappeared
from the roads and retail plazas,
as the parks were shuttered
and the playgrounds were locked away,

coyotes came out
to run the roads looking for us.

When they did not see us
in our usual numbers, did not find
our fast food remnants, did not see
our deadly cars or hear us chatter and rage
at each other, they did not wait

but came forward, more and more,
to go in daylight where they’d rarely gone 
before dark till now. It became clear
to them and to all others
that at least temporarily,

something had shifted.
The air, the ambient sound,
the ground itself
all seemed less troubled.
Lawns and meadows
grew longer, wilder, wilder,
opened up old blooms; 
after it was over, everyone
noticed the honey 
was richer that season

even as the coyotes melted
back into the dark. 
They’d tasted
a different sweetness;

enough for now.

Put the world in abeyance
as singers are passing and dancers
are passing from among us;
these will be spaces
we cannot fill at once. 

Put this life we’ve known in abeyance.
How far we have yet to go is uncertain,
and with the holes in the map
left by the passage of those
who knitted lives together, our way is unclear.

Put the long view in abeyance;
measure progress now by inches
or less. Creeping forward without song,
blind to the path, each step a martyr’s 
touchstone in the pavement;

there is now, in fact and fiction,
only today. Put tomorrow
in abeyance while waiting for 
a new song, a new dance,
a new map for what’s ahead.

Outside the Dollar Tree
on Providence Road
which is strangely closed
at two-thirty
on a Saturday afternoon —

no sign, no explanation.

Several of us standing 
widely spaced before it,
having heard 
a rumor of a delivery
of needed things —
I’m getting a hunch
I’m afraid to share.

A newish SUV shows up
and a guy leans out 
of the passenger window:

“Is it closed? We heard
it was closed for two weeks —
someone on the staff
tested positive –“

“Shit.” 

“We heard there’s a delivery
at Walmart, they’re staggering
the times they put stuff out.”

We scatter slowly
as civilized people do,

every one of us walking
to our cars as wary of the others
as if we were all
carrying spears.