News photo of the Rwandan dead
bobbing naked at the base
of waterfall. Wide hips and narrow
shoulders, surely a young woman once
sexually active. No solution
to death's finality.

Is the production and distribution
of food and other essential services
fragile or deeply embedded.
Can or cannot the economy
support the growing or diminishing population.
The Road Warrior, however shallow,
attracts for its vision of social breakdown
and the sources of regeneration. Of course
Jane Jacobs is more complex and compelling.

The Rwandan dead
had dalliances and alliances.
It is the indignity of their exposure
and the rapid decay of their former lives,
mere mulch, fertilizer
for wild vegetation.
Molecular bonds loosening
and joining new forms.

How do the vast darkness
extending to the ends of the expanding
universe and the temporal light of human
consciousness interact
to make the world?