Paleogene Sleep

I think of ash that learned to fall as rain,
of sky turned bruise, of slow, celestial stain.
The earth rehearsed its long and patient dim,
and every horizon lost its hymn.
I would have stood beneath that muted roar,
when time unstitched itself from every shore,
and felt the world forget its former name,
like breath extinguished into mineral flame.

The forests bowed into a glassy sleep,
their green surrendering to something deep.
No hand was asked to carry forward hope,
no mind conscripted to a tighter rope.
The weight of being loosened in the air,
as stone and silence learned a kinder care.
I would have welcomed that impartial drift,
that final widening, that cosmic shift.

Let meteor write its luminous decree,
let oceans darken into memory.
The ache of thought would settle, cease its claim,
dissolve its need to annotate the flame.
No future pressing nails into the skin,
no endless recursion of the within.
Only the grand reduction of the bright,
the long, administrative end of light.

I would not flee. I would not seek repair.
I would become the dust already there,
a patient witness turning into silt,
unburdened of both meaning and of guilt.
The species dream collapsing into loam,
each fragile nerve released from its false home.
A quiet mercy written in extinction’s breath,
where weariness completes itself in death.

And if the world should end, let it begin
with me already folded deep within
that ancient silence, vast and unopposed,
where every question gently is enclosed.
The pale sky opens like a final gate,
and I grow still enough to not await.
At last the heavy thinking comes undone,
and even longing learns to weigh as none.