April 10

The Last Poem from Earth

All the entrances are locked. 
You can’t get into the building 
without a key card. I think of following
One of the students in, but that seems creepy. Besides, I’m not totally sure I’m in the right place.
There are no signs for the reading anywhere.
So I sit on a bench and watch the kids
Hanging out with their bikes and their dogs
As if the world was not, in fact, on fire.

Finally the friend I’m supposed to meet comes out,
Saying he only got in because he 
Happened to see an acquaintance through the glass.
We are both irritated and by the time we get up to the proper classroom, the reading his well underway. 
There are no chairs left so the professor
In charge runs and gets us one. 
We expect him to bring another but he doesn’t. 

I haven’t been in a classroom in years. 
and I feel geriatric. The building is new,
but the wooden chairs in the room are all mismatched and old. They make me feel
Both sad and comforted.

The first poet reads verse loosely based
On sijo, a Korean poetic form.
There are lots of footnotes
Which he good-maturely admits 
he included because he found the facts in them
More interesting than the poems 
they inspired.

The second poet is thin and pretty.
High, cheekbones, sinewy neck,
Shiny pinprick eyes. She talks about time 
as if she thinks she’s the first poet to talk about time.
She had flown in from Cambridge. 
Her mind blown by time zones. I picture
a globe as a peeled orange.
Her recent collection has a title that sounds 
like a parody. She reads her poems 
like they are the minutes of a board meeting. 
Her work is hazy, without any interesting language
or a single strong image

After exactly twenty minutes she says,
“I’ll just close by reading
the last poem from Earth.” I laugh
but no one else does. She isn’t smiling.
She explains that Earth is the title 
of one of her four books. Four more 
than I’ve had published. 
She reads the poem smoothly and evenly.
I don’t remember a single word o