I Was Called Back
I was called back into the dark during an early morning flyover onto a rusty mauve plain fields overrun with a low river of tar the smell of burning grass carried from the east flowing upward through neon bright signs of pharmaceuticals and snow a bronze liquid of promise a fleeting and always-ending sleep the remains of chipped concrete eating away the foundations of every building tables of salt rising over the whole country I was called onto a platform in the north a miles- wide outpost where I sat waiting to hear what new harm my sisters had conjured they reached me by phone through a star or their dreams a breaking request from our father that had traveled through a long and oily channel I could understand its beauty the rainbow-thick shimmer of pigment and poison a seeping fissure of love before the apocalypse the ruin or just the overhanging clouds yesterday a maker of brine and sauerkraut told me the world would end by corrosion and decay I’m not so sure I hear the eruption between refusal and insistence or maybe just a truck driving through
Copyright © 2020 by Samuel Ace. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 2, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Images of disintegration and decay have been appearing everywhere in my dreams. Not only of late, through our quarantines, but for years. The violent neglect of people and neighborhoods, the virulent racism, the decimation of the environment, and the rusting through of bridges in Cleveland where I grew up. I am ever more suspicious of the artist’s perch and the impulse to document any veneer of beauty without acknowledging the explosion that continues to brew with a ferocity that will not be contained.”
—Samuel Ace