The Future

Past the old one, and the little one. Past the painted ceiling, the scene of the dawn. Past numerical hemorrhages and worry, and tenuous light, stacks of chairs. Past the blustering color. Past a river carved into poverty. Past the javelin, past ceremony. Past what has been looked at until it could no longer be what it is. Past concrete, the raw matter spinning inside of it. Past news. Past posters. Past a lot of demolished cars sunken into the landscape, the way eyes are sunken when it’s been days. Past days. Past all and past none. Past the one who knows what we must pass. Past television, conch, courtship, dimethyltryptamine. Past planar and columnar and spheroid, the bundle, the substratum, the ellipse invisible but for its effects. Past coffee and quiet reading, past conversation, flatware, crystal, and cloth. Past music. Past notifications. Past earnestness and tremors. Past manifestos and heights, the pyramid dizzied by birds. Past enforcement, presence. Past the horrible knowledge. Past the noise and past the muted. Past the predicate and thingness. Past the great cedars, the snow fields, the narrows. Past the fencepost and billboard, the cattle grate and fireweed. Past circumstance. Past what I am about to say next. Past it, and that, and this. Past past. Past present. Past future. Past the infinite overtones, past measure. Past eye and past voice. Past the horizon, the vanishing point, the swell, the frustum, the redshift. Past memory. Past dream. Past the gauzy light and the blue-tinted dark. Past the body, the self. Past effort. Past resignation. Past what has long been gone, and the yard, and the home, and the day in which we lived.