Todd Robinson: Everywhere the World is Green and Dying

Todd Robinson
Everywhere the World is Green and Dying

And shelterbelts
of feeling, barn swallows flashing
over the river,

all fingers reaching,
evenings lush and agnostic
past our dreaming dogs.

Silenced, so many.
I forget the melody,
but not the meaning.

Praise withered taverns
grandfather haunted,
praise starless farm fields,

years of miracles,
green tea and green sympathy
keeping you easy.

    Bouncing scintillant
    sun off the concrete launching
      pad of no one’s dream,

    who doesn’t clamber
    after beauty like Ginsberg
    kissed Walt Whitman’s ghost?

On the sober house
stoop you sway, dishonesty
a moonlit relic.
A dirty decade?
The body’s machinery?
Better thank it than me.

I began again,
another tin man with heart
pills in his pocket.
Tinnitus on high,
contemplating suicide—
no more magnolia.

Start soon? I really
hate to say it but I need
it in the worst way,

tiny grace notes,
clean scientific poison
to keep her quiet.

Faithful and faithless,
waiting for the facetious
moon to send you home,

but prehistoric
mud holds the shape of a hoof
for two million years.

Prescription Xanax?
Yes. Zero chance of quitting
that which makes sky bend.

She’s wearing my socks.
This theft will repeat itself,
in variations.

This is your brother
wondering how you’re doing.
I love you. Goodbye.

Blood-black coffee.
Your face cannot unfrown itself.
The kettle hisses.

Spiritless orphan
sliding nowhere with sore feet
over cracked concrete.

Tree’s bitter fruit, thank
forgetting that swallows each
vial, bulb, and feather.

Serenity prayer:
get grateful for yellow
grass and cracked birdbath.

This pre-elegy
another way of eating
muscle to grow fear.

Even sleeping, she
snores toward the urn we journey
ceaselessly to fill.

Todd Robinson has published two books of poetry, most recently Mass for Shut-Ins (Backwaters/University of Nebraska Press). His work has appeared in North American Review, The Pinch, A Dozen Nothing, and Notre Dame Review. He is an Assistant Professor in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and caregiver to his partner, a disabled physician. Learn more at his website.