DISPATCHES ON THE WAY OUT THE DOOR: TWO POEMS & A NOTE by DARREN BIFFORD

Darren Bifford

HABITABLE EARTH IN LAST ANALYSIS

It’s like in a cartoon, all the forest fires

Leapfrogging fires. Small civilizations caught

In the dirty, say they’re sorry and plead their cases

Ad hoc and brilliantly. “Scared as shit”

Is my summary. Excuses get you

An extra minute. The army is always

Dragging the mutilated

Corpses of the newest emperor

And his son through the streets. It’s no wonder

The sky is filled with frogs. Upturned

The ocean spills its fish and seashells and sharks.

In the old country you could count on fine weather

All summer, vernal festivals, voluptuary laws

Which sanctioned the General Course of Things.

It was a pleasure then, being alive

When a fifth of the world was known. The downturn

Happens when the knowing is over. It’s like

A forgetfulness comes on, a bad cold

That you didn’t know you had until recovery

Commenced. By then, though, you’re dead,

And so it’s the afterlife playing its cards and tricks.

You recall the old neighbors, how they packed

Shoeboxes of photographs. And that cartoon again,

When the talking animals all flee the forest,

Tailed by a great deluge of fire and wind. As if running

Could get you to the somewhere else it’s better to be at.

The great romance was this: there’d always be somewhere to go.

Otherwise there is no literature. As for me, I grabbed a novel

Though I’d never found time for fiction. It’s science fiction now,

Says the Judger. I told you so, says the river, which by now is everything.

Image by Neil Webster, courtesy Red Edge

THIS SUNSET LASTS FOREVER

There must have been a lot of beauty

At the end of empire. Scratch that.

Strictly the usual amount,

More or less, like in a movie

When before he is shot

The soldier considers the dewy grass or the dawn

Over yon golden hills. Which is to say

I doubt it. Consider the fowls of the air and beasts of the field

Christ did not say on the Cross. Why, why, why, why, why, why?

Is closer to the mark. And it was no ordinary day

For those who were otherwise occupied with their lives,

Even given the torturer’s horse scratching its innocent behind on a tree.

For there was a breaking sound in the sky;

We were all as terrified as other slow-witted animals, desirous and hungry.

I’m not getting over this in record time. Oh my heavenly days

Is what my grandmother sighed. Now which book will I take?

Will there be a record player? A mistake in these matters

Will commit us to eternal boredom. Help me

With a Jackson Pollock from the MoMA, whose paintings,

In lieu of small fires or snow storms, will serve to increase our contemplative

Capacity. Now if only we could get some help—I mean,

Help with the moving, not the moaning.

I’ve heard no pianos are housed on the isles of the blessed

Though the wind plays the trees and the trees are willing.

Now that my will is broken I am either left for dead

Or I shall see them forever, my wife, my little boy. They are crossing

Rue St Denis on a winter afternoon, holding hands. Flaring in the mind

Awhile longer like a flare shot to the height from which it falls in the night sky,

Tumbling into wine-dark oceans,

We went down to the ship —  

Darren Bifford on "Habitable Earth in Last Analysis" and "This Sunset Lasts Forever:"

It seems to me both poems use a similar rhetoric to address an identical theme: i.e., the end of
things in general. I see them both as dispatches sent as we're all on our way out the door. The longer line, the loose rhyme, the space for irony--both poems share these features.