The Last Thing

By Laura Carter

Early morning shone the light over your body and I was looking.
We eat oranges at the park
because there is more poetry left for us:
no politics can sustain us,
but maybe love’s beginning can.

And what’s not perennial? In spring, we bloom out
because to make a day is to
vagabond in some sort of shimmering—

         not to diminish, but
         to exert selves
         that are almost

raw, with the crispness of sun at edges.
But yes, that sun.

                   I am not asking forgiveness now.
In earlier times, eternal
light would mean that
all earth’s accomplishments could be set

aside: there would be trumpets.
But nobody knows what is next,

and delicious futures roll of our tongues
at our own peril, at everyone’s.
The circle was always perfect.

                   You trace my heel with yourself, and
the only thing left is the beginning of
a middling that is best when embraced—

somehow, Adam always forgoes old paths.
You tell me the world

                   is cleaner
in autumn, winter.

         It makes perfect sense—
         seasons adumbrate
         perfection like loose gulls,

and the world sings
when it can at death’s approach.

                   Every player
on the stage waits for a resolution or
the light at the end of the last place
we got lost. I smile and then shrug. You
rewrite the stage with obsolete hands,
framing every hen in perfect
green todays.

                   Was each crowned
with something of the ordinary, or
was there a crescent moon that lit up the field?
It’s impossible to find the right answers here,
and the oranges are as good as the sea salt
and caramel gelato that we eat.
                   Tomorrow we may

readjourn the senate of owls that we met.
We may go back to the grove and eat precious honey.
Tomorrow we may take the noble
path out of the city and find sustenance.
Funny thing is, makes a whitewashed story,

tomorrow too emboldened.

Funny thing is, it’s almost like Rome,
and there’s no greater part of me for that,

         images banished
         (at least for the shortest time)

in order to resuscitate the horse.
Which horse? the audience wonders.
Oh, that horse.

         Not the horse of columns, but horse-
         of-many-coats,

easily removed, easily made spring,
         easily de-chaptered,
easily taken from waves,
         and then gone.