The Last Love Poem
       

I am obsolete as my ancestors, the Appalachian glass blowers,
provoking fire over and over to produce their artifacts.

I knew no writing could survive when we started calling children "vectors,"
when our own forests grew heavy with toxic spores.

A map? A list? A series of images? What could I write now
that would do anything? A poem orphaned, a crystalline ornament

with no Christmas in sight, swirled with delicate color, resting
gently on a ledge until the inevitable smash ....

So here in my last moments, let me set down my memories of you:
your rough skin, your green eyes, your slightly clumsy hands.

We turned and smiled at each other on the ugly concrete glinting with broken glass
as someone yelled obscenities and someone else handed out pizza slices to strangers.

When we ran out of flour, we learned to bake cookies out of nuts, seeds, flowers.
We decided, against all odds, to plant dahlias.

Do you see this as a rebellion? That after all this, the poet clings, stubborn,
to romance, to the idea that somehow a small connection,

a tiny universe of fire and friction, might be preserved?

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Copyright © 2017 Jeannine Hall Gailey All rights reserved
from Field Guide to the End of the World
Moon City Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission