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    To See the Earth Before the End of the World
    To See the Earth Before the End of the World
    To See the Earth Before the End of the World
    Ebook224 pages1 hour

    To See the Earth Before the End of the World

    By Ed Roberson

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the Voelcker Award (PEN America) (2016)

    In To See the Earth Before the End of the World Ed Roberson presents us with 120 new poems, each speaking in his unique voice and seen through his unique eye. Earth and sky, neighborhood life and ancient myths, the art of seeing and the architecture of the imagination are all among the subjects of these poems. Recurring images and ideas construct a complex picture of our world, ourselves, and the manifold connections tying them together. The poems raise large questions about the natural world and our place in it, and they do not flinch from facing up to those questions.

    Roberson's poems range widely through different scales of time and space, invoking along the way history and myth, galaxies and garbage trucks, teapots and the history of photography, mating cranes and Chicago's political machine. This collection is composed of five sequences, each developing a particular constellation of images and ideas related to the vision of the whole. Various journeys become one journey—an epic journey, invoking epic themes. There are songs of creation, pictures of the sorrows of war, celebrations of human labor and human society, a respect for tools and domestic utensils that are well made, the deep background of the past tingeing the colors of the present, and the tragic tones of endings and laments, a pervading awareness of the tears in things. Most of all, there is the exhilaration of a grand, sweeping vision that enlarges our world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateFeb 8, 2012
    ISBN9780819571014
    To See the Earth Before the End of the World
    Author

    Ed Roberson

    Ed Roberson (Chicago, IL) is author of eleven books of poetry. His most recent being, Asked What Has Changed and, Closet Pronunciation. He is a recipient of the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award and the Lila Wallace Writers' Award. His collection, Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In was a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; his book, Atmosphere Condition was a winner of the National Poetry Series award and was nominated for the Academy Poets' Lenore Marshall Award. Retired from Rutgers University, Ed Roberson currently lives in Chicago where he taught classes and workshops as a visiting professor at Columbia College Chicago, 2004-7

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      Book preview

      To See the Earth Before the End of the World - Ed Roberson

      PART I TOPOI

      TO SEE THE EARTH BEFORE THE END OF THE WORLD

      People are grabbing at the chance to see

      the earth before the end of the world,

      the world’s death piece by piece each longer than we.

      Some endings of the world overlap our lived

      time, skidding for generations

      to the crash scene of species extinction

      the five minutes it takes for the plane to fall,

      the mile ago it takes to stop the train,

      the small bay        to coast the liner into the ground,

      the line of title to a nation     until the land dies,

      the continent uninhabitable.

      That very subtlety of time between

      large and small

      Media note        people chasing glaciers

      in retreat up their valleys          and the speed . . .

      watched ice was speed made invisible,

      now—        it’s days, and a few feet further away,

      a subtle collapse of time between large

      and our small human extinction.

      If I have a table

      at this event, mine bears an ice sculpture.

      Of whatever loss it is    it lasts as long as ice

      does until it disappears         into its polar white

      and melts        and the ground beneath it, into vapor,

      into air.    All that once chased us and we

      chased to a balance chasing back, tooth for spear,

      knife for claw,

                   locks us in this grip

                we just now see

               our own lives taken by

      taking them out.           Hunting the bear,

      we hunt the glacier with the changes come

                    of that choice.

      Topoi

      1. MORNING

      The year and its

      as like as eggs,

      the days

      in their crates of season

      we break open

      and the yolk

      of fresh sun we scramble

      the runny light into

      a firm

      break

      of the night’s winter

      helping of the fast.

      Yellow dishes—

      forsythia

      set out for the early

      meal of season—

      sit the house    yards

      the town

      parks    down together

      to this spring as

      to a table

      all set

      in order     just

      So

      good to see

      you and

      your way found

      back.

      The arriving coats of smell

      are hung in the air, butt-smacked and

      oiled babies of moment;

      and years of taste as touch

      hug    the senses

      to the living;

      sweet sour bitter salty

      some never experienced

      again, the gloved fingers

      of bananas    so briefly kissed

      with ripeness; fruit,

      grip-shaped thought

      brought to the tongue,

      the finished taste

      of words,    an aftertaste

      of silence,    the morning

      glories we haven’t tasted

      yet

      life, as lasting as any one

      sense, a taste

      a sight, an orange mix

      of kiss with sweetness

      for the moment

      it exists, finishes and

      is swallowed, is also those

      who finish hungry or starve

      to death     which swallows;

      the final stage of rattlesnake bite

      is yellow vision,

      light,     then you both go out.

      Fear, to the tongue, is metallic: I tasted

      a copper penny     it could have been

      a one-time and final, incomparable

      —How does life taste

      to one condemned

      in that cup     this morning?—

      flash of a taste;

      a touch’s backbeat, that single shake

      in the whole

      coital dance    that whiff of ?

      a one-time and final      taste

      taste      this morning

      2. DEEP TIME

      Where trees are a sky

          whose spider web

      radio antennas’

      search receives

      the rhythmic static

       of cicadas,

      a song arrives

          that died leaving

      seventeen years ago.

       Deep

      cumulus leaves—

          whose cloud and Milky Way

      are green,

      and heard but unseen

          insect star   births

                  have yet to reach us from—

      refract the sun

          -light filtered

      through to brilliant spiked

      explosions of nova

          in this hiss

       that one

      day our own

          insect sun will make

      in deep time into deepsong.

      3. PLANETARIUM

      A child already an old man

      sits in a rocking chair in the yard

      facing into the shadow side

      of four elms down the end of the block.

      He’s heard but hears them for the first time

      as the cicadas     he’s looking for  just one

      bowing its wings with its legs

      as he’s been told they do    he wants to see.

      The sun lowering

      on the opposite side of the trees

      pierces through    burning open holes in spaces

      brilliant prismatic    explosions.

      He thinks this is how cicadas’ sound

      speakers look hooked up to the sky

      through the trees     refractive, light show

      to the music & this     evening is their show

      the cataclysmic novas    nebulae

      4. LUNAR ECLIPSE

      You’ve seen only a planed circle of moon,

      the white wafer; the low sky’s flat penny

      grow into that dime, flipped in the turn

      taken by the earth,

        until you see

      what’s won from behind its veil of brightness

      by the lunar eclipse

            a red marble,

      a pinball of blood and it’s your shot, a ball

      of red clay before its pinch into a bowl,

      what I want to say and its look

      that far away from it.

      I want to say it suddenly

      turns three dimensional with shadow

      shaded in at the drawn

      earth-curtain’s darkening;

           and that darkness

      makes shape-informed light clearer rounding out

      midnight,      and moon,

        once it is that lighted ball,

      falls above a night now floored with depth

      so dark above you   you can feel the feet

      and meter fill with time. New Years confetti each

      speck’s fall a galaxy ago back into space.

      Space back into space restored     beneath the moon

      to here in the shading of eclipse.     The distances.

                 We have to feel the spatial in what we see

      to see clearly       the eye measure in hands and feet;

                  as when we kiss,

      distance disappears, our eyes close,

      and we see bodily

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