There had once been a magnificence to these streets
and the evidence of those times was still there in the zone,
in edifices to ideas that had not lasted.
How many days Kelly saw the endurance
of the beautiful, the way the slow degradation
of acid rain and other weather can make
the zone more lovely, not less.
He entered churches where painted
crosses faded from the walls, where wind howled
some days through stolen stained glass, while on other days
birds flitted between the iron braces left behind.
The braces waiting for the theft, the pews remaining
but the organ pipes long gone, dust and smatter everywhere.
A city silt fallen, unswept, a manifestation,
the refuse of long ago prayers.
The birds nesting in the rafters.
American gods, American temples, all the evidence anyone
needed to indict the temporariness
of American belief.
He walked shredded schools lacking students, but not piles
of serviceable desks, ran his hands along the spines of books
left behind, the previous fictions of history,
stories no one wanted to steal.
Bottles of printer's ink lined glassless window sills,
glowed in shafts of sunlight, colored vacant offices
blue and red and black and super blue.
Locker rooms lay unlocked, the locker doors unremoved,
the open wall spilling out of gym floors made of century
dead trees, the wax scuffed with shoes and time, tagged
with layers of spray paint.
He wandered the rows of emptied houses and overgrown yards,
roamed grassy blocks beneath bare socketed streetlights.
In every structure he entered he found
some objects trashed, and some he could sell,
and also some rare and better and less valuable objects.
Objects abandoned by accident, chances, castaways.
Soon he lifted some new bauble from nearly every site,
folded a broken spine paperback into his pocket,
ripped a single pencil marred Ava Maria from a hymnal,
pocketed a child's toy heavy as lead,
a bent tined fork kicked behind a counter.
He brought home some objects he planned to use,
and some he wanted to look at.
And in his apartment he chose a cupboard
meant for dishes to store these more useless thefts.
An exhibit of his travels in the zone.
Of what relics had called out in the places
he'd been, the bleak houses of the blackout city.
Kelly thought the world wasn't full of special objects, only
plain ones.
Nothing was assembled special.
Nothing and no one but the plainest objects
could be supercharged by attention, made nuclear
by suggestion.
He could pick up the same object in two different houses
and in one sense a completely different thrumming.
What he wanted was anything loved.
When he couldn't remember anymore
where he had taken something from, then he threw it out.
Making emotion last wasn't the object's first power,
but it was the power he wanted most.
Anything he took from someone else's life
wouldn't work forever, but if he kept acquiring more,
maybe the feelings might remain, transferred across the overlap.
The fall sun shining on the waving grass, the hardy scrub
of trees spreading across vacancies,
everywhere he took something he tried
to leave something else behind.
The unexpected juxtaposition of nature and ruin.
Metal for memories, memories for metal.
There was so much he wanted gone.
There was such a sprawling untenanted city in which
to dump it.
And in the following streets he discovered
the great perseverance of the people left behind.
Their faces shined in the light wherever
he saw them, on porches or in driveways,
outside liquor stores and bars.
He wasn't their neighbor, but he saw their beauty.
They looked crazy with grief, the great glory
of their sadness, the way it would last and last.
He needed to eat and there wasn't any work,
but what was he taking from these people?
Nothing, he told himself, they had not already lost.
To leave the edge of the zone for its center
was to abandon the present for the future
and wherever Kelly went he thought
he might be the last person to see these sights.
Others would come with bulldozers and excavators,
or else with arson and theft.
But they wouldn't see how he saw, moving carefully
through these rooms and hallways,
staring out these windows, marveling
at the way you could see the lit skyline of the inhabited city
from the endless dusk of its unlit neighborhoods.
There were still some progressions in play,
but he saw how the zone had moved beyond time.
Or at least outside of the time marked by digital clocks,
smartphone calendars.
Inside the zone events moved along paths
solar, lunar, seasonal, new geological epochs
marked by strata of waste.
Areas identifiable by the brand names
left inside cupboards, by the industrial design
of unpowered appliances.
A preview of what the world might look
like during its coming decline.
Kelly pretended he carried the last human gaze door to door,
window to window, exploring the first outpost of a culture
pushed past repair.
It could be destroyed, but could it be fixed?
All the better futures might not arrive.
He didn't think his was the final generation,
but perhaps the last might already be born,
and what did this mean for him, the good man
he had tried and failed to be?
In some houses he found handwritten notes.
He found one taped to the cracked
plaster across from the house--
I'm sorry-- He found one taped to the cracked
plaster across from the house's front door.
We're leaving in the morning.
And then the date the last inhabitants left, not so long
ago.
In the back of a child's closet he
found a scrawl of crayon reading, I'll be back for you,
written to the house, to whatever
the child thought a house was.
Sometimes there was an animal living there still.
The animal was always a cat.
What did these cats eat?
Where did they sleep, and piss, and shit?
Sometimes it wasn't hard to see, the skeletons of mice, shit
in one quarter of a room, the smell of piss everywhere,
the cat following Kelly from room to room,
rubbing its body against his boots.
Names everywhere on the houses, in the ashfall,
carved into trees, fences, doors.
I love you house, one note read.
I built this house with my hands, said another.
Goodbye.
I'm sorry.
We had to leave, but this was home.