#MIDDLEBURY
Utopia: Love As Last Day
Joe Hall
The forest rings so wide, it is the world. The sky, ocean, hand
In hand rising to tides, particulate excreta. The river mouth
The moon lights in blindness through the forest, hot, tumbling silver by houses
Like mushrooms crowded. Ladder by ladder, neighbors pass ore in ladles
While this planet hushes into a cinder. The moon unlocks its continents of water
So the outline of a sail appears as its cobalt face – the forest
A ring tight as the throat sings wider: who arrives
Who arrives who arrives. In the office I ask
If the cup my coworker is holding is real. It doesn’t look real. It looks like math’s
Translated bed. Beside their chainsaws, loggers smoking-brain-
Dead, lung-dead, I am the operator of something – the mouth with green rot touching
The metal slurry of the ocean.
The singer sings the last verse. The last
Song we hear, stepping outside the heat
Into the dark pine, the moon dissolving like lead.
In the office I ask, How could the news come?
In our terror echoing as profit.
About this poem
“I’d been writing a series of poems on utopias and utopic communities and started to realize how much millenarian thinking was wrapped up in them. So this poem picks up the thread there.” – Joe Hall
About Joe Hall
Joe Hall is the author of “The Devotional Poems” (Black Ocean, 2013). He teaches at the University at Buffalo and lives in Kenmore, N.Y.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Joe Hall. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
