modernity by Rob Budde

all of it made carefully, over top
the ground, calculations of amplitude,
erosion, gestation;

the engineers looked over their shoulders
down and away, a blueprint of forgetting

fingertips placed gently together in front
of the magistrate's words

it is not mortality i am fighting;
it is what that sure-footed vision gets you
that bothers me

the coherence cannot hold

power grids, establishment
reckoning, the aesthetics taught as formative--
all those attempts to justify
the expenditure, the waste, the damage . . .

it is a letting go, an un-named
un-naming strolling over the hill
i seek       no longer
god or mystery
but anonymous among us