WHEN DURHAM IS COASTFRONT PROPERTY

The Czar of America will swoop from the skies, his wings
those of a metallic angel, his head that of an alabaster hawk.
There will be crepes and canapés served at the coronation,
though the Czar will prefer pigs in a blanket, and the Czar
will consider us all swine.

Glaciers will tip against each other like dominoes.
Shards of ice will slip from their sides, coughed forth
like foreign objects from obstructed airways. Warmer
waters will cradle them, dissolve away the million icy years
since Atlantis froze.

And we will be drunk, very drunk, in celebration that
we have swallowed the world when the world swallowed
everyone else we loved. I will call you Little Fury,
you will call me Gas Huffer; we’ll deliver pizzas on solar-powered
scooters to the new beaches.

Off the coast of Greenland—Lemuria that doesn’t know
its own destiny—there are hundreds of ancient species of fish
that, when unthawed, will talk. The Earth has a hollow ring in its core,
one discovered a hundred thousand years ago, where men crawl
and reptiles walk upright

on the other edge of the crust we live on. We have been so wrong
about gravity being created by mass; they bind our feet
to the outer Earth, and we bind them to the concentric sphere inside.
We share only an ocean, connected at great depths, one that will grow for us,
will shrink for them.

We will pray for everyone who believed nothing was wrong
when the water reached their knees, then bellies, then necks.
Arizona will be a Sahara, Canada a rainforest. But only snakes will
have migrated north, and birds will have died off. The Czar
will have skies to himself.

YOU WERE HERE

I know years are linear—but rather than timelines, I find you
in maps, on curious topographies, crossing lines.
You were here—I am reminded by blue interstates stretching,
or a bold X, or anonymous planes between coasts;

you are both place and placeless. The memory
of you has a shape, a terrain of lakes and fissures that makes
days inconsequential. And now this place is you, yours;
I will disappear in time first to haunt walls, an attic,

a crawlspace the blueprints do not reveal. Will you
later find me in maps and legends, plot coordinates
when you look to a past that swallows not you but the space
around you, classifies it into grids? Or do you hold

that nothing lasts, plates shift, and, irrespective
of place or time, know only you were here?

WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE

Water under a bridge, it begins.
Water seeping through the ears,

seeping into the cortex. Water behind
the eyes. Water in the sinuses. Water

in the temples, down the throat.
Water under the bridge, they say.

Water under the bridge, beside the bridge,
flowing over the bridge, wearing the bridge smooth,

hammering the bridge in tsunami, submerging the bridge
to rust in unimaginable depth, swallowing the bridge

before the next ice age, when it will be dug out
by the curious, explorers of an older world

where people had to have bridges
because so much water had to be crossed.