Schrodiger’s Cat

In Utah, there are men trapped belowground
as machines bore down toward them
and the newspapers shriek and oscillate.

Once, I would have said that both
not only could be, but actually were true:

that the men were standing in the inhaling dark
watching the blooms of their headlamps flail
against the earth’s constriction,

and that the crush of coal and stone
had already consumed them
until we could carve back that mouth.

Expose the breath or the black.

But now we know that the star
goes out after thirty million years
of light traveling toward a stop.

Its last ripple laughing at nothing.

Not even our faith in it. Not
the possibility of return, or of orbits
not ending, of circles beginning.

God’s death, they say, was long ago.

The sun continues its strange wobble west
at its long fixed distance, and night comes.

In Utah, there are men belowground.

Flowers of flesh, flowers of bone.