Farewell

In a pillowcase one could hide the brays
and lows of this place's final days,
when chimes will sound in the fields
to smuggle mutiny into the lively brains
of parking lot attendants. Where is that
fabled stairway to the sky? Why worship
doors covered in calendars? The questions
never end. Take for example the aquarium.
It forms a strangeness with its sound to make
worldly nonsense visible behind glass walls
like a dream perhaps, meant to teach us
how to prepare ourselves for endpoints
obscured by fiction and fog. At times
too serious, at others not serious enough,
I organize life with old ideas, in silence,
and with a cosmic sense of nature failing
I set off into southern wilderness to seek
some subtle center, as elusive as a crisp
dollar bill in the spillway of a penny arcade.