Steady Now

Although things vanish, are what mark our vanishing,

we still hold on to them–ballast against the updraft

of oblivion–as I hold on to this umbrella in a world of rain,

of heavy wet greens and grays dissolving into a new

atmosphere, a sort of underwater dulled electric glow

off everything, the air itself drowning in it, breath

thickening, growing mold.  Yesterday I felt the smell

of grass greeting me as across a great distance, trying

to tell me some good thing in an underglaze of memory,

some forgotten summer trying to speak its piece.  It is

the way of things and it never stops, never calls a halt–

this knocking and dismantling, this uprooting, cutting out

and digging down, so tall oaks and honey locusts are

laid low and drop to earth like felled cattle, shaking

the ground we’ve taken a stand on as if it were a steady

establishment, a rock of ages to outface ruin itself, not

the provisional slippery dissolving dissolute thing it is–

which we have against all the evidence set our hearts on.

~ Eamon Grennan