Recession
This is how to build a house of air.
The trick’s positioning: our cash erodes
circuitous riverbeds, meanders
through this fiscal wilderness.
We feel it: season of drought,
the dried up Dow Jones.
We try not to sweat, because
we sweat nickels. We stand
in dusty riverbeds and pray, we lie
in the rushes and wait. We must
stay here—must drag our bodies
through mud, must wear neckties.
When the next flood swells
above the banks again, we’ll flail
for something stable, pocket
what river rocks we can,
but be subsumed, trade abstractions.
For now, we await a greater recession,
the whirlpool door to the dark. We laugh
or grit our teeth and grind away
our molars. There’s always money
to be made. Our houses are plus signs
and water vapor, igloos and ponds.
Our wells reach deep for groundwater.
Where does value go when it goes
down? Water table, mantle of earth,
dense as the clay of the riverbed.