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William Matthews - The Waste Carpet
Work rating: Low

No day is right for the apocalypse, 
if you ask a housewife in Talking 
Rock, Georgia, or maybe Hop River, 
Connecticut. She is opening a plastic bag. 
A grotesque parody of the primeval muck 
starts oozing out. And behold, 
the plastic bag is magic; 
there is no closing it. Soap 
in unsoftened water, sewage, asbestos 
coiled like vermicelli, Masonite shavings, 
a liquefied lifetime subscription 
to The New York Times delivered all at once. 
Empty body stockings, limp, forlorn, 
like collapsed lungs. A blithering slur 
of face creams, an army of photocopies 
travelling on its stomach of acronyms, 
tooth paste tubes wrung rigid and dry. 
Also, two hundred and one tons 
of crumpled bumpers wrapped in insurance 
claims, slag, coal dust, plastic trimmings, 
industrial excrementa. Lake Erie is returning 
our gifts. 


       At first she thought she had won 
something. Now it slithers through the house, 
out windows, down the street, spreading 
everywhere but heading, mostly, west. 
Maybe heading is the wrong word, 
implying shape and choice. It took 
the shape of the landscape 
it rippled across like the last blanket. 
And it went west because the way lay open 
once again: not the same fecund rug 
the earth grew when white people scraped 
their first paths to the Pacific 
across the waves of the inland grasses. 


Outside Ravenswood, West Virginia, 
abandoned cars shine in the sun 
like beetlebacks. The ore it took 
to make the iron it took to make the steel 
it took to make the cars, that ore 
would remember the glaciers if it could. 
Now comes another grinding, but not— 
thanks to our new techniques—so slow. 
The amiable cars wait stilly in their pasture. 
Three Edsels forage in the southeast corner 
like bishops of a ruined church. 
There are Fords and Dodges, a Mercury 
on blocks, four Darts and a Pierce Arrow, 
a choir of silenced Chevrolets. 
And, showing their lapsed trademarks 
and proud grilles to a new westward 
expansion, two Hudsons, a LaSalle 
and a DeSoto. 


       I was hoping to describe 
the colors of this industrial autumn— 
rust, a faded purple like the dusty 
skin of a Concord grape, flaking moss- 
green paint with primer peeking 
blandly through, the garish macho reds 
insurance companies punish, the greys 
(opaque) and silvers (bright), the snob colors 
(e.g. British Racing Green), the two-tone 
combinations time will spurn like roadkill 
(1957: pink and grey), cornflower 
blue, naval blue, royal blue, stark blue, true 
blue, the blacker blue the diver sees 
beneath him when he plumbs thirty feet— 
but now they are all covered, 
rolling and churning in the last 
accident, like bubbles in lava. 


And now my Cincinnati—the hills 
above the river, the lawn that drained 
toward Ricwood Ave. like a small valley of uncles, 
the sultry river musk that slid 
like a compromising note through my bedroom window— 
and indeed all Cincinnati seethes. The vats 
at Proctor & Gamble cease their slick 
congealing, and my beloved birthplace 
is but another whorl of dirt. 


Up north near Lebanon and Troy and Rosewood, 
the corn I skulked in as a boy 
lays back its ears like a shamed dog. 
Hair along the sow’s spine rises. 
The Holstein pivots his massive head 
toward where the barn stood; the spreading stain 
he sees is his new owner. 


What we imagined was the fire-storm, 
or, failing that, the glacier. 
Or we hoped we’d get off easy, 
losing only California. 
With the seismologists and mystics 
we say the last California ridge 
crumble into the ocean. 


And we were read with elegies: 


O California, sportswear 
and defense contracts, gasses that induce 
deference, high school girls 
with their own cars, we wanted 
to love you without pain. 


O California, when you were moored to us 
like a vast splinter of melon, 
like a huge and garish gondola, 
then we were happier, although 
we showed it by easy contempt. 
But now you are lost at sea, 
your cargo of mudslides and Chardonnays 
lost, the prints of the old movies 
lost, the thick unlighted candles of the redwoods 
snuffed in advance. On the ocean floor 
they lie like hands of a broken clock. 


O California, here we come, 
quoting Ecclesiastes, 
ruinous with self-knowledge. 


Meanwhile, because the muck won’t stop 
for lamentation, Kansas succumbs. 
Drawn down by anklets of DDT, 
the jayhawk circles lower and lower 
while the sludge moils and crests. 


Now we are about to lose our voices 
we remember that tomorrow is our echo. 
O the old songs, the good days: 
bad faith and civil disobedience, 
sloppy scholarship and tooth decay. 
Now the age of footnotes is ours. 
Ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid. 


While the rivers thickened and fish 
rose like vomit, the students of water 
stamped each fish with its death date. 
Don’t let a chance like this go by, 
they thought, though it went by 
as everything went by—towers 
of water flecked by a confetti 
of topsoil, clucked tongues, smug 
prayers. What we paid too much for 
and too little attention to, 
our very lives, all jumbled 
now and far too big in aggregate 
to understand or mourn, goes by, 
and all our eloquence places its 
weight on the spare word goodbye.
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