Poems From:

Things Of The Weather

 

SUNSPOTS

Perfect, this orb, unblemished,

constant, pure—unlike its fickle,

pallid sister sphere that crooned,

feckless, to love-starved cats, that

pulled the tides of women’s wombs

until they bled, flooding our sheets.

No shadow-shapes of rabbits,

vague contours of human faces.

Clear and fat, an egg yolk

clean of any slime, a gleaming

round, Apollo’s lyre, logos—

the lofty eye of God.

No splotches on this realm.

Yet ancient Chinese sages,

medieval English monks,

and later, Galileo saw

what in the nineteenth century

Schwabe and Carrington confirmed:

a cyclic rage of solar flares, titanic

tongues whose mass ejections

hurl a billion tons of TNT

our way, paralyzing satellites,

slicing into messages, our cells.

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(First appeared in Boulevard)

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THUNDER

To Descartes, one cloud falling

onto another. To the Greeks,

Zeus’s shield shaking, a forerunner

of Hopkins’ shook foil, that grandeur,

gathered and charged. For the native

tribes of the plains, Thunderbird’s

wings beating. Such magnified

oscillations are beyond us, yet

the very air we breathe is grumbling,

a succession of compressions,

negative and positive ions colliding,

as someone in the next room

is about to explode.

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(First appeared in Poetry)

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THERMOKARST

“Over thousands of miles in Alaska’s interior, patches of forest sink into thermokarsts and die as swamp water floods them. It is a frequent sight on the roadside: a stand of tamarack, gray, spidery, dead, rising from muskeg water.”

–William K. Stevens, The Change in the Weather

Tamarack in old habits—

firmness of permafrost’s

hard layers beneath—

till underground ice pockets

thaw, and earth falls in,

diagonal. The sky

no longer up, and roots

awash in bog. Melting

causes spring, and health,

and sex, we think, liquidities

like mother’s milk,

kindnesses that would be

kindest if dependable.

When sudden flood

befuddles us, how to find

the bottom, or the stars.

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(First appeared in The Literary Review)