Originally published in Wingless Dreamer’s Fruits of Our Quarantine
–
As we might imagine the last pebble of salt
trailing its way out of the restaurant’s glass
shaker, life is going to end in this way.
On its lonesome, gyrating its fated path out
and down the chute, all our hard grievances
ground to the last and final salt.
*
It will also end with us staring wide-eyed
at the sun, the pleasure of ice cold lemonade
in-hand, lubricating sweat soaked fingers, or maybe
it’s a double whiskey that’s aged in an oak barrel
poured neat into a well-contoured glass,
whatever your vice or preference.
*
And the trees will bloom just the same,
a hundred-thousand small bombs in white & pink
will be the color of all our deaths, like the colors
of Vermont snow at sunset & the colors
of fluorescent jellyfish deep in the water
at forty-eight hundred feet
& the colors of freshly bitten strawberries
devoured in the summer heat.
–