I can’t wait
for some future someone to
uncover,

in the huge garbage dump
the earth will have become,

the address label from my
most recent New Yorker Magazine.

Though faded and stained
by the soot and soil
it will be buried under
for all those centuries,
it will be miraculously preserved
by the shards that might have
destroyed it.

On it will be,
still legible,
though irrelevant,
my 15 letter first and last name,
my 4 number-24 letter address,
though the house, by then
will be decayed to rot and mess,
the 5 numbered Zip Code,
whose topography will have been
vacuumed by the last errant missile
launched in the final,
hopeless extremity
of the bad guys,
or by another huge hurricane hit
just before some almost human-less,
Nature-made equilibrium
began to be restored.

The label will be discovered
by one of four scruffy scavengers
who scour together for what had been,
at first,
security,
but by then,
forse of habit.
Scratching in the rubble,
he will stumble over a
slab of siding,
and there,
beneath,
somehow,
will be the label,
lodged in the neck
of a web-cracked, green bottle,
empty of the
“Extra-Kick Jamaican Ginger Ale”
I drank so long before.

The four will
neither
know how to think
it got there,
nor
what all the ancient markings
once meant.

By then,
the only knowing of any import
will be
what they can safely eat
and
what to leave
alone
in the ever
deepening
dirt
beneath
their
feet.