Poem by

BRENT ARMENDINGER

ANTHROPOCENE

The desert twitches at some

invisible breath: a precarity

which can only be seen up close.

The yucca schidigera,

its soft tendrils growing

from a mass of arrows pointed

at the sky, common name

Spanish Dagger, as if

to impale the sun, colonize

fire. The earliest leaves

begin to echo sand,

itself the echo of mountains,

arrows of earth trying to get away

from itself, like we talk about getting away,

from gravity, from debt, from

just last month a chunk of ice

the size of India melted. The daggers

bear our names and by our I mean

every sixty minutes

I count what’s mine and

grow cold from all the counting.

As a boy, I was an arrow of flesh

trying to leave itself, swallowing stars

to feed the burning

at the center of my name.

In the North Sea, there’s an alphabet

of oilfields named after waterbirds,

the myth of a winged crustacean,

a child of fier hath much dread

or so wrote Chaucer,

six hundred years before Sputnik

fed the burning at the center

of the space race, sixty years before

Elon Musk told a crowd

of startup founders, I’d like to die on Mars,

just not on impact.

Five years ago, the Falcon 9

landed on the Of Course I Still Love You –

a ship without captain or crew

in the ocean whose name

goes back to Atlas with only a robot

inside to say I love you.

Who will be left

to bear what we have waged

when we launch ourselves

like arrows towards

the bloodfrozen

wanderer, a planet

named after a god of war?