Trailhead at the End of the World


POETRY
08-14-02024

I meet myself each morning,

at the end of the world.

I sleep and I wake and I meet myself,

and I say,

with tired earnest,

“Again? Again!”

And make my way to the trailhead,

at the end of the world.



I pass roadkill on my way there.

I pass roadkill on my way everywhere.

I bow my head at each time.

I pay my respects,

fighting an urge to feel pride,

for taking the time,

to pays respects,

to rat pancakes.

I try,

I try,

‘I’ try,

to find the equality in grief.



There’s a snake in the road,

near the trailhead,

at the end of the world.

His front half undulates without progress.

his back half is crushed into the pavement.

I pull over,

and moved him off the road,

to the shade of a bush I think is sage,

and grab a rock

to crush his skull,

but can’t find the stuff in me

that blow takes.

I leave him a puddle of water,

as a lesser mercy.

Isn’t that what’s wheezed,

desperate and dying,

at the end of their world?

“ W a t e r , w a t e r . ”

At the trail I run on rust red dirt.

And drive lizard from hiding.

I run casually,

he runs like his world is ending,

and our pace is equal,

and try to lose track of whose steps

drum whose apocalypse.



If I were to rest

in the shade of a boulder,

fleeing from the first human of the morning,

in hot fear,

could I abandon Anthropocene?

Could I leave my humanity,

and join the Earth’s martyrs,

living like a weed

beside the dead-still Ferris Wheel

in the abandoned amusement park

east of Chernobyl?

Could I leave the end of the world?



I lose the thought as I find a bee,

hoping from cactus flower to cactus flower,

legs loaded down

with saddle bags of gold pollen.

“I can be a little bee too, goddamit.”



I poke my pinky

into a flower,

and carry pollen down the trail,

dabbing it against the next bloom’s tiny sex.

And,

for a moment,

the end of the world ends.



I know there is life after death,

there is no question of that.

So much is dead,

and here I am.

How long I will be a part of heaven?

Where do ‘I’ go,

when I hear my name for the last time?

When my proper noun

melts into the Earth,

does my body stop being a temple,

or start being one?

Where can holy begin,

if it does not seem to stop?

When every moment,

between dirt and dirt,

‘I’ dream a dream of ‘I’?

I don’t think ‘I’ comes with me.

I don’t think ‘I’ survives the end of the world.



I’m drinking good coffee though,

at the end of the world,

savoring a rare slow morning,

during a busy apocalypse,

holding down two line cook jobs,

at Tratto and The Coronado.

High cost-of-living here,

at the end of the world.



Someone knocks on my door.

I put down my cup,

and look out the window

too see a leather skinned lady

straddling an e-scooter

spray painted pink.

“What new interruption is this,

at the end of the world?”



“I’ve just seen a cat,”

she says,

“struck dead by a car,”

she says,

and my head bows mechanically.

“You belong to one another”,

she says,

and rolls away.



I put my hands inside two Target™ bags;

good ones,

thick plastic.

I pry his light body from the road,

and bury him deep

in the hard pack clay,

of my landlord’s backyard.

I can’t tell the story of his life,

but that is okay.

It’s written on the Earth.



Here ‘I’ am,

in another afterlife,

a bit more nameless,

a bit more absorbed,

a bit more eternal,

at the end of the world.