Regardless, the trees will still stretch out
from their wrinkled sleep,
will hang a canopy of limp hands. Look down

that quiet lane where the branches make
an arch, and say what you see:
far enough down, any road becomes a street,

or ends in the wild. The fireflies are being
mistaken for stars again
by the drunkard stumbling home alone

through the woods. When the water runs
brown from the tap
you would do better to wash the dust

from your eyes with the gin left pooled
in this broken bottle.
Every campfire arrayed outside

these city walls is the seventh tongue
of an angry god. If only
Life, having formed so suddenly

in that primordial moment a billion years gone,
had done so five minutes sooner,
there would still be time enough left

to figure out how to avoid all this. Look up
at the wall-to-wall sky
just barely visible through the foliage,

ask yourself how perpetuity
is shaping up:
likely it's less eternal than you hoped.