The Professor Looks Into His Crystal Ball

The Professor Looks into His Crystal Ball You want to see the things I see? This world of ours is hardly perfect, Careening round a dying sun That someday will engulf in flame The desert ruins of our cities And poisoned sludgeponds of our oceans. It wobbles in its orbit even now, As if it worried for the future, The fragile envelope of life Giving way here and there to death Under our giant carbon footprints, And we are the most luckless skeins Of accident to have survived, To weave ourselves into a culture Of noncompliance, casting ourselves Against the gale of dissolution, Contrary birds. Don't get me wrong: We may somehow outlive our shadows, Find ways to save us from ourselves And from the monstrous huge machines That carry us so carelessly And just as easily can crush us, Not those we built but nature's own, Slamming great comets into planets Or sucking into timelessness Beyond horizons we can't see The matter of which we are made, Torturing it in endless silence. But when I speculate that we May thus arrive at life eternal, I mean our deepest of descendants, If we can only father them And mother them wisely enough. But that approach to heaven waits For our most distant generations, Not you and me, not in our lifetime. We're going to die, without exception, And live on only in the wave We were part of the water for, Consoled or not that our offspring May find their way out of the holes, The ones we've dug ourselves so well And bigger ones we didn't have to. With hopes so thin, what of regrets, You ask? Abundant as the flowers Of May are chances that slip through Our grasp, each one a brilliant ensign

Of sorrow, sweetness still longed for, Acts of pure justice we failed doing, Now seen beyond our helpless reach Like every chance I ever had To be with you and have you be With me in that brief garden, love, That place where kisses are the language And song the meaning of the words, Where you'd want me and I'd want you, And even wearied out with sex, Too tired to move, but not to touch, We would make love sleeping together, Make love of dreaming in embrace, In this last summer of existence.