You are never mentioned on Ararat
or elsewhere, but I know a woman’s hand
in salvation when I see it. Lately,
I’m torn between despair and ignorance.
I’m not a vegetarian, shop plastic,
use an air conditioner. Is this what happens
before it all goes fluvial? Do the selfish
grow self-conscious by the withering
begonias? Lately, I worry every black dress
will have to be worn to a funeral.
New York a bouillon, eroded filigree.
Anything but illness, I beg the plagues,
but shiny crows or nuclear rain.
Not a drop in London May through June.
I bask in the wilt by golden hour light.
Lately, only lately, it is late. Tucking
our families into the safeties of the past.
My children, will they exist by the time
it’s irreversible? Will they live
astonished at the thought of ice
not pulled from the mouth of a machine?
Which parent will be the one to break
the myth; the Arctic wasn’t Sisyphus’s
snowy hill. Noah’s wife, I am wringing
my hands not knowing how to know
and move forward. Was it you
who gathered flowers once the earth
had dried? How did you explain the light
to all the animals?

That streetlight looks like the slicked backbone
            of a dead tree in the rain, its green lamp blazing
like the first neon fig glowing in the first garden
            on a continent that split away from Africa
from which floated away Brazil. Why are we not
            more amazed by the constellations, all those flung
stars held together by the thinnest filaments
            of our evolved, image making brains. For instance,
here we are in the middle of another Autumn,
            plummeting through a universe that made us
from its shattering and dust, stooping
            now to pluck an orange leaf from the sidewalk,
a small veined hand we hold in an open palm
            as we walk through the park on a weekend we
invented so we would have time to spare. Time,
            another idea we devised so the days would have
an epilogue, precise, unwavering, a pendulum
            strung above our heads.  When was the sun
enough? The moon with its diminishing face?
            The sea with its nets of fish? The meadow’s
yellow baskets of grain? If I was in charge
            I’d say leave them there on their backs
in the grass, wondering, eating berries
            and rolling toward each other’s naked bodies
for warmth, for something we’ve yet to name,
            when the leaves were turning colors in their dying
and we didn’t know why, or that they would return,
            bud and green. One of a billion
small miracles. This planet will again be stone.

Green spring grass on
                     the hills had cured
                              by June and by July

                                                                          gone wooly and
                                                                brown, it crackled
                                            underfoot, desiccated while

within the clamor of live
                    oaks, an infestation of
                                          tiny larvae clung

                                                                        to the underleaves,
                                                             feeding between
                                         veins. Their frass, that

fine dandruff of excrement
                    and boring dust, tinkled
                                       as it dropped onto dead leaves

                                                                    below the limbs. You
                                                          could hear it twenty
                                                  feet away, tinkling.

Across the valley, on
                     Sugarloaf Ridge, the full
                                       moon showed up

                                                           like a girl doing cartwheels.
                                                  No one goes on living
                                       the life that isn’t there.

Below a vast column of
                      smoke, heat, flame, and
                                  wind, I rose, swaying

                                                              and tottering on my
                                                    erratic vortex, extemporizing
                               my own extreme weather, sucking up

acres of scorched
           topsoil and spinning it
                                outward in a burning sleet

                                                                of filth and embers that
                                           catapulted me forward
                                 with my mouth open

in every direction at once. So
                     I came for you, churning, turning
                                         the present into purgatory

                                                                because I need to turn
                                           everything to tragedy before
                                I can see it, because

it must be
           leavened with remorse
                      for the feeling to rise.