Eric Falci

All Sat in its Quiet

Days later and beyond our ken the firetrails spanned the doomscrolls.

Wander your way down the stony planks.  Elicit all the tactics

And questions that you’d like as the earliest of the collar towns

Keep ringing the exhibits.  Formerly rampant, latterly shunned,

Those keeners slogged the track, alternately spurred by and shattered in

Occurrence, devices littering the furthest jurisdictions.

*

And even later than that, the thin ties still buzzed and shucked their way

Across the grounds fixed for parataxis, bright as limes, strewn as gods

Among their dumb and endless wares.  Kept it ticking over: strangeways

Arranging the stumble down.  But again, arrivals cratering

Along edges and runnels and middens.  The gaggle couldn’t see

Anything past the groundcover, stuck in the rut as you rigged it.

*

Perhaps you’re right about the blatant unseriousness of my

Apparency: I could only lurk on the edge of a series

Of useless epitaphs clinging to the one wall.  You determined

Well ahead of time each token’s portion of your scorn, and you held

Fast, keeping up some tally in the smoke.  The hawks scud as you had

Asked them to so many times before.  Filth washed down from the treetops.

*

Such backscatter plunging from the remains of the gangle, pooling

At the midriff.  Short of time, the trip that you planned against which you

Set yourself from the start suited someone else: hold it awhile

And let me be.  That short career at the blockades would never cease

To stumble you up as you sampled the middle distance and drained

The caves in the foreground.  They found ourselves ready for none of it.

*

In the shallows, no, the furrows, the procedures caught us outside

Of a loop while the filched remains and geegaws littered the causeway

As tearaways flew from our hands and outpaced the trail cars vexing

The line and carrying the visitants transporting themselves down

The hallway as though on a string past the empty shut rooms along

That scrim disclosing how this made way for that and who might be spared.

*

The regime’s most fully-rendered effects determine each figure

As it might appear to those bidding up the contracts, tucked along

The fold, whinging about the cold, neck-deep in the snow, refusing

To move away from the talismans stowed against emergencies.

Continuing atop the archetypal wreck, at any week’s close,

The sorters moved a stock of properties along its zany paths.

*

Space in the market dwindled incessantly.  Somebody else’s

Privileged plight down to the chambers brought you out of your methods

To watch how they’d situate effects on the damage map this time:

Those who found the faults as they drained along the channel lurked upstream;

Those who might only ever dumbfound would encompass nearly none

Of it; those at the rim of the ash as it settled over this

*

String of affairs torqued by rule; the lengths to which those at the ridges

Went astonished the valley’s revenants as they tended their storms

And stifled their dissent.  The smell of rain over rain covering

The ‘tricks, quaintnesses, hieroglyphics, and enigmas’ that shouldered

The town.  Glum and shine, grim and stutter, mesh and grain all converging

On those who roused themselves at last to take in a view of the task.

*

Let among our slipshod efforts to adhere to that sunk parade

Of costs as it spun on its end there be some several certain

Paths that none of them took lightly or without consideration

Of the endless exceptions that would occur as someone queried

The bit from the beginning about the time you put the car on

Its way to visit the highest coral ever filmed in the wild.

Epic

The ruck foundering in itself as it couldn’t but do –

Its own dank keepsake and cloaked for the future,

This little bit of warning swag, this swatch of cursed

Muck in the yard that you avoided nearly all the time

Except on those days impending rain when the street

Took its distinctions to heart and ran with itself.

There are too many ways to indicate gall,

All of them occurring at once to the one shouting

On mute in the corner of the screen as you provoked

Yet another spectrum of response among the remnants

Of the crowd, each of whom might as well host at least

Some stretch of the show, since the whole array of rage

And grief cobbled together at the start struck you

And the others there in bad faith as entirely wrong.

The extensive commentary on the solo suites

Aside, the current crew would want what it wants

And quickly.  The pilot programs cadenced too late

For most of the room, apart from those furthest

From the din and strife of the schedule.  Ranged

Against the remains like anyone’s stack of coral,

The means fumbled the ends and what transpired

Among the assemblies during the doomed run

Was something that was only ever mentioned

In passing and to no one at all.  The earnest spate

Of captions emerged, stunned in themselves

And bullied into their proper channels by some

Ambient wreck of a thing who knew enough

To withhold that bit about your trouble in the ruck.   

In the Next-to-Last Exurb

Someone suspected during their daily walk

Along the pylons and into the carved-out zone

Where the remaining storefronts competed vainly

With the caravan that they would wonder whether

Anyone driving the straggle of cars would realize

How every costly maneuver that was tried

Would make it that much more difficult to ever

Ascertain whether those within shouting distance

Near the curb but far enough to avoid the shock

Of noise emerging from the belly of the thing

Might actually understand what their demands

Entailed and fully agreed that someone had to –

Backlit, as we were and would remain, by a dampened,

Muffled glow that came from some other portion

Of the sky – place before the entire assembly

Whose refusal to gather together up until this point

Had been predicated on that refusal’s disregard

The case for extending any visitant’s right

To remain on their trail where it took them

And no matter the ways in which their own acts

Along the edge could ever be known at a time

When only a few of the camera positions

That might ultimately be deposed could manage

To testify as to the grain of one’s intent.