World never over, only continuing to end: how, almost by magic, 

you don’t improve. To bathe your mangy, fly-fucked stomach 

begins with cruelty—so comes the time for the sky to wash its hands 

of us. The myth claims that we could clutch you in a fist and toss you 

blindly into some future, our own wriggling seed bank.

Yet all lands are hinterlands, and all the heretics of the future

gossip about us while we chatter like blind tourists in a warming

country of the deaf. Did any of them recognize each other

cantering up the gangplank, or was each quadrupedal Eve helpless 

without a God to explain her to herself? Innocent as she was.

How the mercury panics in our thermometers as the sky inhales

the roach we pass it, how it coughs in our faces. Tell me whether

we deserve it. No one could have guessed how long the Redwood

would live, too long for us to check whether our guesses were right, 

an afterthought with no after. Take my hand if it’s still there. Use it 

to overwater my succulent. Use it on you, but wash it well first. 

After the flood, I like to think that you could watch the ducks

float on top of new oceans, milling like boats with nowhere to go. 

I’d like to let the new sun and moon onto our ark together, 

holding hands. Tell me whether we deserve that, at least.