Good Friday

Maybe I live at the end of the world.
There is a throb of videogames from the den
next door. The off-tune kilter of women’s voices
chants Good Friday into being over the church
loudspeaker. A flare of grayscale clouds
mushrooms along the edge of a mandarin setting sun
and the neighbors burn plastic garbage. Sweet acrid
smoke bites the moist membranes of my nose,
so I smell the end of the world, and I see it
in the soft sleeping snort of my child, his perfect
eyelids, over-sized lashes, precious slope of cheek.
Renaissance painters would have coveted him, made him
a cherub lingering on a sfumato smudge of cloud, eyes
cast down, waiting for the Resurrection.
The Hail Mary’s will go all night in vigil
and the dogs will be witness. They worry the crease
of dusk with their tinny whine. They wind
up the night with a cranking rhythm of howl and bark.
I wonder if I will miss the end if I blink, like today,
when I went to the movies, and as the screen flickered
at me, riot police gassed a lynch mob out
on the highway. It was done by the time I drove
home past busloads of billyclubs, mopped off and packed
away, cops pissing behind their old cars, the people
playing cards on the curb with wary eyes, watching
everything. Nobody was blinking. And still
the thunderclouds moved in and hosed down
the day, the world always trying to make itself
clean and new in spite of its own ending. The cherubic
child will bounce with anticipation at boiling eggs,
mixing three tablespoons of vinegar with its sharp
stink into the water to make all his colors brighter.