Eye of the morning is scratchy red,
the sort on the edge of burn.
I climb out into her, into hours,
sleep draggy on our lids. I step outside
to soak in the calm of an ancient blue sky
where all about are scars of our malfeasance:
Shedding trees, once green, now necrotic,
bow heads in bald submission. Resigned.
The singing grass that once coronated spring,
fearless as children, never took: more shades of
brown instead. And even this, yes this, the
pulse of artificial streams in my own backyard
has given in to vapors and run the way to sun.
Meanwhile, as I sit, the rusty whip-rain cracks
up through the still. And suddenly she seizes:
an epilepsy with lighting flecking sky and eyes
rolled back into the cumulus. I sit there, cross-legged
in the rain, and helpless.
Because I don’t know what to do.
It is not a state I have ever, we have ever —
in our dependent state of greed —
hoped to calm. We inhale the brown, and pause, and
wait for it to pass. As it has, to this day,
always faithfully done.
