An Amber in the Autumn

Preserved in a lozenge of shadow,
the pressed fly
still flickering in the imaginary,
the graphic novel, of a belabored history
of too many disasters, the rounded edges of something proposed
though not forgotten: the gum of an ancient tree,
the sap of a dead swamp, the press
of onyx against carbon, fossil in a rock garden:
not everything then is forgotten
or entirely lost – strange! or has been yet – and therefore
will be? may be? might be? who knows? (Hume, save me!)

Who knows what will keep pulsing
beyond the predictions of the physicists, the fundamentalists?
in the fumes or ghosts of the never-to-be-delivered end?

(A furrow of music like a culvert between ditches,
crushed life like oil,
an ember away from nothingness or immortality,

o you, unresolved cadence everlasting.)