Not on Dover Beach, but on Daytona

Not on Dover Beach, but on Daytona,

the century has turned, and turned again, since Matthew Arnold.

That poet mourned the passing of the sea of faith

while this one marks the dying of the sea itself.

I ask my therapist (she hears me out on Thursdays)

that in the light of what is just ahead

(Anthropocene extinction) what’s this little life, this death,

my bleating on our ever-darkling plain?

She’s young, my counselor, and I am old,

but neither of us (true to one another)

has joy, or love, or certitude, or light

(and search for rhymes here and you’ll search all night).

The sand beneath our feet in Florida is fine.

No cliffs here beetle over us; no moon-blanch’d land behind.

Instead, a rainbow in the æther arcs above:

first left, it dips; then right: no godhead’s signature.

We’re looking neither up nor down for miracles

or coded messages, or help for pain.

They’re conversational, our poems now:

just a kleine nachtmusik as Rome goes up in flames.

I turn my face to Rachel and I meet her eyes.

Listen! Sophocles is here today as well,

and Arnold, and even Anthony Hecht (he of “The Dover Bitch”).

The sacred and profane, we stroll together, damning our species’ eyes

but mostly our blindness. Here on Dover Beach, and on Daytona,

our lights are winking out; the seas are rising;

the ice dissolving; and the methane bubbling;

the whales expiring; and the storms increasing;

as ignorant armies clash by night by the Aegean, as by the Caspian;

Pacific, and Atlantic; Indian . . . and Adriatic.

Ah, Friend, let us be true to one another.

Let us be, a little longer, to savor these sounds,

these seas, these little silences,

so various, so beautiful, so few.