Apocalypto
Tonight the city says there is nothing more to sort out,
stay in and get your rest.
But out on the streets walking feels like a purpose
and the haze that burns your lungs curls up from the pavement,
unmistakable as the cinema halls
peddling fantastic rehearsals for the apocalypse.
Maybe it’s an invitation to keep doing nothing,
or maybe this is the arrival you’ve sought all winter,
beyond the posters and empty ticket windows,
along these sidewalks named for martyrs and archangels,
the thing that holds you up pushing you forward,
cataloguing the invisible faces of oblivion.
John W. Evans's appear in Boston Review, Best New Poets 2006, Hayden's Ferry Review, Poetry East, and Verse Daily. He will be a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University this fall. He blogs regularly at www.howtolikeit.blogspot.com and oversees the Katie Memorial Foundation ( www.katiememorialfoundation.org). (wevbo@hotmail.com)