Jerry H. Jenkins
THE MALL AT THE END OF THE WORLD
This is a tale of the end of the world
as seen in a shopping mall,
after the Cannibal Period passed,
after the Great Denial
of who was to blame, who suffered most—
No one is left to tell
of the way it was or of who we were
before the missiles fell,
or the day the nations passed away.
But this place tells it well.
Gone are the strollers with howling kids,
the gum-popping gangly teens,
and leathery seniors who strode along
in their Nikes and work-out jeans,
the clerks and the cooks and security guards,
the midnight clean-up crew,
managers tending the bottom line
and hairdressers waiting to do
the blue-haired matrons and models and wives
with teases and foamy goo.
The stores are empty of all they held
before the Great Attack.
Macy's still advertises its sale
and so does Radio Shack.
Long ago, looters ate all the fries
and the pizza, and drank the Coke
from the food court's garish and tacky stalls
but the food court had its joke—
for by then E. Coli was well-entrenched,
so the looters sickened and croaked.
The glass storefronts are shattered now,
inside them are looted racks.
Sunlight still brightens the corridors.
The skylights survived intact—
and so did the mall's inhabitants
(or at least the inhabitants' bones)
for they litter the floor for an acre or more
and cover the tiling stones
like white tinker toys shaken out of their cans,
or fragile xylophones.
Perhaps they were here when the bombs went off.
Perhaps after many years
they came to this place of ancient grace—
of Penny's and Saks and Sears
to remember the way the world was once
or how it might be again,
or just to find shelter and warmth and light
away from the winter rain
that poured from the acid and hostile skies,
etching the skylight panes.
The sparrows and finches that strayed inside
when the mall was full of life
have built their nests in the vaulted roof
with packaging twine for chaff,
and the trees that were planted to decorate
the space by the entrance door
have grown to a grove where rabbits live
on grass that grows out of the floor.
With every season and passing year
their numbers are growing more.
For many, this mall was a way of life.
For many, it was their death.
But for all who came, the end was the same:
Dust to dust, the prophet saith.
The seasons roll, and a modest vole
is nesting in someone's skull,
and the same is true of the others too—
both the mean and the merciful,
whose white skulls house the wren and the mouse,
who have lined them with dime-store wool.
ON VIEWING THE TARANTULA NEBULA
Spider, what are you doing there in the corner?
Though your web is intact, you move along it
like a patient engine, shunting and switching,
tending the junctions.
How do you spend your days and your nights? In boredom?
Merely watch the clock in your daily cycles?
What a fusty world is the world of spiders.
Maybe you're worried.
Out in space are ponderous star-clouds, turning,
winding round their bobbins of emptinesses,
slow, deliberate, gathering mass, becoming,
growing galactic.
We all yearn in dark and cold between lifetimes,
seeking matter we can inhabit again.
Seizing what drifts by, we weave our new bodies:
star, spider, human.
All of us tend our webs and their obligations.
This time only luck and a random dust cloud
let me amass a human body, while you
have to wear spider.
VIOLINS
Their music is the pure refrain
that cries to us out of the heart
of living wood whose lustrous grain
Amati harvested for art
From forests coming to no harm
through cutting of a tree or two,
unaware that they would charm
a future world they never knew.
The pain of those selected trees
the artist carved with keen bright knives
persists today in symphonies
whose majesty exalts our lives.
Now, among earth's teeming streets,
unseen alien artists go
to harvest humans fit to meet
a usage few of us may know.
Like trees whose agony ensures
the resonance of violins,
the transformations they endure
move an inhuman audience.
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