SHIPPING DATE

when will we arrive
cushioned by our own
waiting -- as people,
we mix it up until
we’re confused, like an old man
exploring his face in the mirror
trying to discover someone he can recognize,
and we fish around

searching the appearance of those around us,
perhaps beguiled by a gesture
that we seem to remember
of a girl in the fourth grade we
once knew who is now
embodied in a transformed child
foreign to us yet familiar,
or get hung up on an old neighborhood,
trying to remember how it was --
a business or two gone --
a Russian deli
now a Chinese dim sum place
the sidewalk itself
darkened by thrown out
cottonseed oil at night
is host to different sounds:

“Where are you from?”
the most common
question now in China
and we are asking, “When
will we arrive? What was
the shipping date? Can we
track -- us? We’ve been sent. We’re coming.

And this is just the beginning,
from what scientists say:
oceans are rising to reclaim us.
Those in Bangladesh
will crush into already crowded
Calcutta, and Lima
will become the desert it is
once again. How

will we recognize ourselves
when it, the new package, arrives
the new geography of selves
shaped by our anticipation
and, strangely familiar,
delivered by horrifying suffering
and startling opportunities to be
our undiscovered selves.


Copyright © 2009 Gene Berson All rights reserved.