“The Moon Watches Us Come and Go,” “How My Dad Thinks the World Will End,” and “Recipe for Cake”

I’m not one to admire change. I’ve been here

for billions of years and will be for billions more,

and in the time it has taken me to draw a single breath,

you meat puppets went from pissing on the savanna

to whipping past my feldspar plains a dozen times

in tin cans forged from lumpy rocks you pulled

from crust, shined them up, pounded them flat,

launched them to space where the sun still shines.

You want rocks? I am all rocks. Not a single slice

of your folklore cheese found on my dark side.

And then I had to watch you flutter,

a last-minute gas ejection to fake out boulders

and find room for one small step.

There is nothing tranquil about what you call

my “light side,” my “look good” side, my “I’m ready

for my close-up side” with your Hasselblad cameras

and cardboard flag, all that rock collecting, stealing

from my face. You humans have been good at scarring

the lands you discover long since before you were ancient.

And then I had to watch your pitiful ascent–

how you packed your bags and headed back

to that jewel, no, that joke, right? That joke you call “Earth”

and splash down in what you call “water.” Go home

to what you call a “ticker tape parade,” to what you call

“kiss your wife,” and get what you call “licked” by a dog

and hold hands with what you call “family.”

You back up your army tanks into your two-car garages

and hide behind your borders and missile defense systems

and Star Wars laser platforms with your secrets

and your wishes and your finger-pointing.

And I’m left with that one day.

That one day you stopped

looking at the height of the walls you build.

That one day with Walter Cronkite,

when you all looked up,

and you all looked at me.

and he’s not wrong. Look at that gas meter,

his Charon finger extended. Look at the tangle

of wires, ugly from street to gutter to cinder block

foundation. That’s what’s gonna kill us.

If the power went off, there are only fifteen people

in the world who know how to restart a gas refinery.

If you ask someone to retrieve a metric socket

from a Snap-On toolbox, do they know

the measure? Can they find the windshield wiper

cap for their electric car? How do you change

a watch battery? Who even wears time

as a handcuff any longer? This poem

is not unlike my father–how I ask him

lots of questions, menagerie his answers

in a typesetter box above my fireplace mantle.

He taught me how to stack wood, build infernos,

and now all my appliances run off gas.

He clicks his tongue like a bouncer's tally counter

for bar attendance. No one cares anymore,

he says. It’s gonna be the end of us all.

Harvest ten apples from the field where young kids

tend to wet their pants. Shave off the skins

and save them strained for later. Collect enough

wheat germ, bleached and ground into flour.

That is what they used to do around here—

dip wheels into water, run belts inside mills,

wrap those belts around wood pulleys to turn offset stone—

a pretty smart use of flood waters before we could pump

them into ponds and pressure towers with names

in sans-serif monograms you can read from expressway windows.

Pull three eggs from underneath a chicken,

maybe multiple chickens. Kill the chickens and put them

aside for later. Find some yeast from wherever you get yeast.

I’ve never seen anyone actually make yeast.

Bleed the batter red from exocarps the color of sunset.

Shave cinnamon from sticks you get at the local spice shop.

It’s a common topic at cocktail parties: how that shop

stays open in this e-commerce age. Everyone expects

they are selling drugs behind the bottles of Herbes de Provence.

You can’t bake with open-air fermentation.

At least not reliably. Cut the apples, coat them

with half a cup of sugar you get from a plain store

where everyone complains about having to pay for bags.

Mix the ingredients together. Put them into a dirty oven

contained by a bundt cake pan handed down one generation.

When the cake arrives and fills the house with scent,

cut a slice the size of a stopped heart.

Give the rest away.