[[[Naomi’s note, Monday, December 12, 2022. Nicodemus’s work speaks from a brief gap in the forest where the late-Anthropocene meets a yearning for redemption. The topographical, visual direction of his poems (“strolling from faun into oblivion”) seem to document the very last days on Earth, as he whispers a final hymn to the poet Bernadette Mayer. Find Nicodemus’s website here.]]]

I am not asking for a grave
in the planetary scale
or looking for your hands across a notebook,
but I will nod and say hello
to language, to poetry, to the maximal space of the page
left blank for you

            as I walk down the street
past your childhood home, hoping the pigeons
stop midflight and
hand in the air
hiss at the autumn sun
bandaging the moonrise
                                                    coming on soon.

And as slow as a seedpod,
            uncankered and undergrown, I trip myself
for the tongue of the moment.

I do not hold many things close,
Books are scattered everywhere
in my apartment
so clumsily one day
they will all burn.                    And ash-made
the sky itself will become
a giant ampersand.
            God asking more questions
in the final revolution
of hollowed daydreams,
powered, of course, and gilded,
of course, by the coarse frost predicted by the weatherman.

Later grief comes
when the body feels
midwinter
pleasurable for a moment.
            Then cascading to the cosmic honor
            of remembrance of life
strolling from fauna into oblivion,
tending the sour garden of unturning
and blatant joy at the grass
between the yellow brick
row houses.

There is no map now. No questions left
for the city blocks given over
the sons of landlords,
the revolutionary heart blips
for every photograph of friends
just hanging around drinking
Pepsis and doing coke