Mauve dawn,
gunmetal city;
busy and bustling,
lecterns awash in light.
Livestream link. Check one, check.
Index cards, recitations in the mirror;
“in case of roundtable, break glass.”

Calm, calm.
Conciliatory.
The crudité is room temp—
damn.
Off to the next.
A rooftop,
a beer garden,
a picket line,
a dining hall,
a locked room,
unperturbed.

Photos, everyone—
get close.
We’re all friends here.
Can you send it to me?
Upload, repost, celebrate!
The steady turning of the tide,
the predictable orbit of
niceties.

And yet,
a veneer of certainty
fraying at the seam:
Who is that yelling?
A thrust pamphlet, an epithet,
a diatribe on Park,
pled to everyone and no one.
Not at me, not at me,
I’m trying!

All the while,
a thousand violent ends
and a thousand more beginnings
careen and ricochet and are so loud,
calling attention
to something on the horizon.
Dare to look? Oh,
but it’s so awful.

And then a shaking of the shoulders,
the scruff of the neck,
pulling, pointing—
look, look, look.
Do you see it?
That glacier-that-was,
reduced and diluted,
torrid and swirling now,
a glint of light on a dappled wave, like a wink.
As if to say,
more to come.

Tsk, tsk.
So sad.
And then off again,
because this ground beneath
is untroubled by jagged topography,
by fickle hydrology,
so surely stable
and unchanging.
And there are people to see
and hands to shake
and bad thoughts at the margins
to hold at bay.

Invectives, concessions,
blame, conditions, pointed fingers—
all so tedious.
After all,
what is grievance in the face of oblivion?
Alas, with a sigh, she says:
argue as you will.
A glacier slips
regardless.