The lights of the world were going out
& I was going out with them.
So I said to hell with it
and walked on full of hellfire & fluoridated water—
a missile of dumb confidence under the sun’s sadistic
vespers.
Dark fell fast.
Birds gave way to bats. The moon’s black yoke above
a big bit of nothing.
No light, just implacable night.
Soon enough, I found myself in a fix:
quicksand cooled my Quixoticism.
I sank.
Not fast but subtle—a drowsy shimmy
into an underworld of allomorphic rock.
There, I fumbled among fossils for a while, then quit—
my history finally natural history.
The truth is
we’re never alone.
The earth is fully peopled
with people. When the lights of the world went out
I went out with them
and though you’ll never hear this from me now know
that all I ever wanted from love
was that it never change.
Adam O. Davis is the author of Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande, 2020), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize. His writing appears in AGNI, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Natural Histrionics.
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