Modernity Is Catastrophe

He woke in the middle of a nightmare.

The terror lay in his room

like the body of a dead animal

covered with flies. Its teeth

shone in the grass.

                                A French soldier,

half-asleep above the stove of a peasant,

turned, restless with insomnia from his problem:

“What can I know, if anything?”

He knew he could doubt; besides that, 
could he know anything at all?

A man raised a tube in Italy

with curious lenses toward the night.

The moon bowed its face toward him.

“What will I see there, if anything?”

To his eye he put the tube and squinted.

“Cara luna, will I see anything at all?”

An Englishman sat carefully writing

a work of indisputable logic

through the night. He raised his eyes, reflected:

“What can a man do, if anything?”

In the darkness he heard someone whisper:

“What if he can do anything at all?”  

A gentleman in Paris totted up figures

in two columns on a smooth surface of calf-skin:

“What can I make, if anything?”

He counted again: the numbers added up, beautifully.

His fingers grasped the quill so hard it split.

“I can make more. What if I can make it all?”

It was nearing midnight in Europe.

A messenger was crossing the mountains,

taking an urgent notice between sovereigns

who had never met face to face.

Nearing the summit, he stumbled,

his boot dislodging a stone

that fell, gathering stones as it went

in a wind of rocks, trees, snow, 
collapsing across the valley

in an avalanche, burying it all.