As We Enter the 3rd Millennium

As we enter the 3rd millennium
roots reach down like gnarled hands
boats rise up on waves like ballerinas
buildings bloom like flower gardens
skies turn purple then gray
then yellow-gold then white as a sheet
for a split second on everyone’s eyelids
and astounding things take place in them

Saith Tiresias
sitting full weight on a miniature city of sugar in
robes of flame or flame retardant
cerulean satin
his long dark face an enigma in a space where
everything else is openly plain and simple

Birds fly through slack telephone wires making their
casual auguries first
one direction then veering off at an angle into another

Ants carry and are carrying on as usual
unmindful of the year’s embrasure
which may be a new word I’m coining because I
can’t think of one momentous or
all-encompassing enough radical in its
edgenessness right at the
razor’s edge of things metamorphosing into
entities rare and strange at the
sound of the millennial bell or at least the
wooden sound of the clapper inside the
bell since the reverberations of the glassy brass
bell itself will resound all the
way through the 3rd millennium
to the fourth

when wingéd horses may be as commonplace as cars or
thought transportation eyesight itself
able to teleport us to far-off places and
straunge strondes as Chaucer that
early second millennium
observer of human foibles would say and his
strange words tumbling through the lengthy and
wildly troubled centuries to us still

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11/25/1999 (from Millennial Prognostications)

Categories: Poems