Post -Factual Love

Post-factual love poem

by Paul Guest

I’m thinking of the boiling sea

and the dream in which

all the fish were singing.

I want to wake up with my heart

not aching like death,

but I am always falling

in to terror. I’m a good person.

I grieve to appropriate degrees.

I mourn this season. This moment.

I mourn for the polar bear

drifting out of history

on a wedge of melting ice.

For the doughnut shop

which reached an end

yesterday, after decades and decades.

I’m thinking of the light

at dawn. Of the woman

in Alabama who ordered

six songbirds from a catalog because

she was lonely. Or

heartbroken. I’m thinking

of the four that came

dead in the box, mangled.

Of the two that are

missing. I want to tell you

that they were spotted

in the humid air

winging above a mall.

I want to tell you a story

about the time leaves fell from

the trees all at once. I am

thinking of cataclysm.

More than anything, I want to tell you

this. I want to disappear

in the night. I want

the night to vanish from memory.

I want to tell you

how this happened.