Climate Change
Sure, we breathe in the history of the world in the air that everyone else has breathed before us, the rain once an ocean, our blood and bodies mostly water. But if we are the result of fish that learned to crawl and grew honeycombs inside their chests, then my hands were once fins and therefore frighten me. Is that why Christ broke bread with fishermen? If I nail a fish to two pieces of wood, does that constitute a sacrifice?
I don’t mean to offend. I’m stuck on what it means to be human. Are we heaven-aspiring mimics of some celestial design gone wrong? Mutants whose cities should have risen underwater, our borders changing with the tides?
It’s warm today like the inside of a shoe. Though I should be turning on the heat this time of year, I’ll lie in bed with the windows open instead tonight, and in my dreams the sea will come calling and wash its shells and pink anemones over my human body, and I’ll wake up suddenly, as if about to drown.
American Nature Poem
The wildflowers’ brevity is a holiday the animals loudly shoulder, a genesis as easy as good-bye, a sentence in the sunshine I’m sick about, a dying promise of shade and brightness, the wedding of wind and light, the sung river, like blood, and sure, the real hour, exacting, sewn therein, still obsolete, the drift in the garden, the half-forgotten rain, its surgery, its pain, never a voice or a listening, a dying concealed, music like memory, a bone umbrella, oblivion radio, everywhere, white meat, a delicacy, a rude American face, pronouncing an empty violence, like water, like water when it gets to be too much, and all you can do is wait for the next hundred-year flood.