Classic Poem

When the world dissolves in its own chemicals
And the people's bodies are as ghostly as the particles discovered by Josephson in 1962, which pass through walls like light through air,
And the people's buildings are born again as blueprints, and the print is invisible and the blue is the blue of the innocent, amnesiac sea,
And the hardwood trees, falling in forests everywhere, their fractured branches tangled like a woman's hair after love, make no sound not because they are not heard but because there is no longer anything for them to land on and thud against
(The pine trees like unplayed whole notes trapped in a barbed-wire stave) —

And even the stones have become as insubstantial as thought —

May there be new cities in the tolerant sky,
Held in place by their own gravity
(Or lack of it), places of peace where a man and a woman
Holding each other in the familiar bed of their long night
May see, through the window, as clear as light
The stubbornly loving shadow of a star that was once our sun.