Days When I Imagine the Future is the Past

by Paul Guest

And the darkness is best described as other
than velvet, or a bruise the precise hint
of an unknown fruit, when the night is haunted by wind,
by physics, really, when you get down
to it, the way that the world feels in your gut,
when you dream of vampirism
and it seems right, just so,
true to your biography,
which includes a place of birth,
and parents and a time of day
and where in the sky did the moon hang like a glassy dream,
who on that day quit breathing,
who died wrapped up in wet, astounding pain,
blood on the floor and walls
and outside persistent rain coming down like nuisance,
I think of Jimmy Hoffa
who vanished from this poem just now,
and Amelia Earhart,
her lasting thirst and the little island which swallowed her up,
and the Lindbergh baby
found buried in a shoe box,
no knowledge his father was a Nazi sympathizer,
a sort of vileness I thought
was safely trapped in the amber sap of history,
but, no, look who is president right now
and everyone who wants to be
and it makes a shattering version of sense
that my heart is
thudding, messed up, good as single use plastic is good,
I answer to my name like a dog on a leash because it is mine.