Decline and Fall

You’re history.

I see you as Carthage, in the days

when no one listened to Cato,

or possibly Paris

in the early-to-mid-eighteenth century.

I am the last Mongol siege of Samarkand

and the year Franklin and his crew

were swallowed by lead and ice.

You could be the Beagle’s last voyage,

the invention of pencils, paper, or Greek fire.

I am the day a mom-and-pop industry

began manufacturing enameled metal signs

that said White and Colored.

You are, perhaps, the first arrow point

dipped in secretions from a frog’s gaudy skin,

a fortune in smuggled tulips, bulb-

shaped domes covered with gold

beaten thin as ashes, glowing against snow;

I am the route of a pharmaceutical salesman

with a revolutionary new cure

for morphine addiction: heroin.

You might be the South Seas Bubble

as the market was beginning to turn,

the first iron shoe nailed to a horse’s hoof,

or even the first garderobe.

I am opium wars, train passengers

shooting bison through open windows

or crowded together in cattle cars,

the last quagga in the Amsterdam Zoo,

a mouse in Priestley’s bell jar:

a small future

winking

out.