Foghorns

The foghorns this morning: on my deathbed, the very last sounds I'd like to see.

Yesterday walks through the park: everyone over the age of 10 is walking with some awareness of their own death, most of them for the first time. The tiny traces of joy in the awareness, an almost happiness--people I don't know but who look to me like they're thinking about who they'll say goodbye to should they get to choose, and what they'll say.

A crowd of people crowded into their masks.

At some point, given the effect the constant bombardment of messages have had on consciousness, commuications having worn us all out, all we'll be able to read are short poems, a poem a day. Our leaders will make shorter and shorter speeches then, imagistic utterances that last no longer than :60 seconds. The audience--us--attend to the words attentively, having almost lost the ability to listen, grateful that the speaker is sticking to his or her promise to say as much as possible with the fewest possible words We hear ourselves mouthing those barely audible gasps of appreciation often heard at poetry readings at the end of a poem, for the one or two tiny truths the leader imparts, cloaked in the form of an image, so that the words "one and one make two' provoke an audible response from most of those in attendance, while the words "two and two make five" winnow the responding crowd to one or two literary scholars.

And then what?

We'll sit around the campfire of silence,burning everything spoken and written since the beginning of time.