Well Bottom Blues

My partner and first reader/editor thinks this is a little preachy if not in fact curmudgeonly ranty. Thoughts?

Grinding Ink

“To whom do we tell what happened on the earth, for whom do we place everywhere huge mirrors in the hope that they will be filled up and will stay so?”
—Czeslasz Milosv, “Annalena”

I want to swallow the world
before I’m gone or,
worse, it is gone,
out of my sight,
before it burns

reading thick books,
collected works and such,
to fill my retirement hours 
with beauty, to learn to see
this world with others' eyes.

THEY have fed
the library of Alexandria
to their machines,
choosing to burn the earth 
instead.

How will the children
speak of the world
to one another
when all the words holding
memory are gone

when the last pen
is dry and the last book
subsumed into
indeterminate electron
clouds, moldering mulch?

I am shedding memories
like leaves, even as
names come back to me.
My eyes are going
strange places

take off my glasses
to better see the waterbirds
over the lagoon
but reading words 
requires correction.

I spend a lot of time
on corrections—
my manuscripts, 
immortality in 
the death of trees.

Will that matter
if all the trees are gone,
my heron and anhinga
companions with whom 
I walked in the forest?

I have children,
a first grandchild,
Should I be fighting
instead of writing and 
let them be my immortality.

I write because the young
as always, must save the world
themselves, here at the end
of writing, of history
of genuine memory,

all digested
by the machine
like that old magazine,
summarized for
a narrowing world.

I do what the old do
in the old way,
writing what I have taken
out of the world
to try and put it back, better.

As I type on my tablet
words are automatically stolen.
Just let them be preserved
on something that will outlast
the punch card, the eight track

the elegant reel-to-reels
of the old connoisseurs.
I would these words
be handset, printed
with vegetable ink

on paper not harvested
from forests—not
because it would persist
but because it could persist,
when we remember

how to live outside
the machines
of wire-threaded glass,
the alluring illusion
of their spun light.