From the TV remote to the group text to the ghoulish glow of the tablet I should have stowed before curling into bed: The world’s abiding awfulness is always just a click away. It’s as omnipresent as the WiFi it rides like a jet stream. It leaps between fellow citizens—a furrowed brow here, passing comment there—like a pathogen, a mood.

You’re aware, I presume, of what constitutes this awfulness? Of the climate crisis, the democracy crisis, and the election that’ll put both on the line. Of rising income inequality and eroding reproductive rights. Of wars. Of everything that’s overwhelming. How it’s everywhere all at once.

How does one cope? There’s drinking (I’ve tried it) and meditation (sleep-inducing), activism (good, if exhausting) and full-on fetal surrender (that didn’t work in 2020). Lately, though, I’ve found a better treatment, something portable, something free: I think about the Earth’s geological timeline and my own tiny lifespan. I zoom out from the crises that define my era and linger on the cataclysms of the past: the dinosaur-annihilating asteroid, the reshuffling of the continents, the first human to speak.

There, in the company of cosmic devastation, today’s headlines recede. Our global sauna cools when I picture woolly mammoths trudging across my driveway. I close my eyes a little longer, and a glacier glows in a living room where the TV speaks of war. I can even forget the faces of this nation’s villains by imagining the molten lava that once swirled across the Earth. They are ash, and I am ash, and our awful era floats away like smoke.

I like how I can access these worlds while buying groceries, commuting, or writing an email—channeling an apocalyptic Walter Mitty as I reimagine geologies where people disappear. It helps to have a reference for each scenario: Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, notes from an exhibit on fossils, a high school physics textbook. The latter led me to intergalactic finales, star systems collapsing like constellated Fourth of Julys.

Is this a by-product of an ostrich-like retreat into research, reading, and the mind? Perhaps. Let the record show, though, that I still volunteer and vote. As a poet who believes, as Whitman did before me, that poets should be their “age transfigured,” this is how I transfigure mine.

In my latest poetry collection, When the Earth Flies Into the Sun, I often linger on planetary upheavals, sussing out the solace and sublimity that such events allow. (The sublime, Rainer Maria Rilke tells us, is something so beautiful it threatens to destroy us.) Each poem, I hope, distills my peculiar treatment into a tincture. They’re aspirin. They’re escape.

That’s how I found myself imagining, in the book’s title poem, what happens when the Earth finally flies into the sun. The answer: “it will be morning every day.” Other scenarios followed on the page after a short audition in the mind. In a poem first published here at Zócalo Public Square, I write to the first human speaker. In a sequel, I address the last human on earth:

Your end in the end          will come before dawn:

the sun’s just a sun—       your shadow alone will know            that you’re gone.

In the undiscoverable history of human figuration, the sun, I like to think, precipitated our first metaphors. Our shadows, by the same logic, the first personification. As a writer always working to coin new metaphors, I take a perverse pleasure in imagining their extinction. The sun, once again, is “just a sun.” What else tells us that the Anthropocene has come to an end?

Imagination is an asset at such moments of crisis. There’s no hope without it, nor any social justice. Whoever endeavors to change the world must first imagine it anew. But it’s also a balm when those crises overwhelm. In 1942, as the magnitude of awfulness exceeded even our own, the poet Wallace Stevens described his vocation like so: “to help people to live their lives.” Poets achieved this by making their imagination “the light in the minds of others.”

In the oubliette of my insomnia or the shudder of another mass shooting, I try to do the same. I hunch over my desk; I scratch a few lines into my notebook. If I’m lucky, imagination fills a poem’s paper lantern, and—years later, revisions complete—it floats into the world. If I’m not, I can seek solace in one of the many poetry books scattered across the room.

I’m not alone in this second, readerly desire, as recent catastrophes attest. In the months following the attacks of 9/11, W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” attained a sort of pre-viral fame. It helped that the poem opened its lament where so many Americans ended their day: at a bar feeling “[u]ncertain and afraid / As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.” The repugnant Muslim travel ban of 2017 returned many readers to Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus.” Putin’s invasion of Ukraine compelled me to recite Adam Zagajewski’s “To Go to Lvov” to my students.

These poems provide a necessary reassurance. That the world has broken before. That we’ve jigsawed it back into shape. Poetry’s marginality—roughly 12% of Americans read it—also suits it to moments of crisis. Now is the time for elevated speech, some part of the populace concedes, because we’ve already tried everything else. Devices, drink, distraction, debate: None provide, as poems do, the hand at the small of one’s back, the rain that cools in the fall.

I used to think that poets had superpowers. That they could lick a finger, hold it up to the wind, and tune into the suffering of the world. But I have come to believe that we’re all capable of registering the world’s suffering. The question that lingers is what to do next. For me, this entails imagining geological sweeps of rock and species, stars and shore. These provide me—and, I hope, whatever readers join me—a detached sort of peace.