Wasn’t it farther
But we approached the rippling
Water
Where bird
Carcasses
In the ebbing
Caught a webbed
White bone

Mountain-backed
Smoke soot or
Chemical plume
Billowed from stacks
Where charcoal trains
Charging to Tooele
Ran out of track
In referential haze

An ice sheet
Once crept
Where
We creep
And the remnants
Of an idle
Inland sea
Cry for poetry

Am I smart enough
Am I good
Will my foot sink
In this sandy pan
Of prismatic atoms
Mauve snow
And sunned salt
Embedded here
Since before the
Anthropocene

We take panoramas
Talk nerve agents
Poison gas and tests
X-files shit
Dugway’s that way
Beyond that range
But we agree
Better to stay put

Better to paint
Post-apocalyptic scapes
Put on the hair
And take turns
Saying
While decorating a splash
Of red and yellow ochre
Happy little firestorm
Just a happy little firestorm
Roaring up the forest

From California
The noxious ash
Becomes a part of me
Body and mind
Except the ether
It can’t reach
Weather comes
Eating the unnatural haze
And I realize my blessing

I picture a happy
Little skeleton
Of squirrel
Amongst the broken staves
Of forest
On the Belgian front
Where some wounded man
Thinking himself too far
Into the density
Perishes by the nip
The nippy nip

Life goes on
Somewhere it goes
It keeps going
Do you feel it going on
Going on all
Around you?
Do you feel your blessing?
Do you bless others?
Is it okay to bless others
Or does that make you a god
And people aren’t gods
Or are they
A divine spark of Pope
In each and every mind

At the silent mirror
I talk about the thousands
Of midges that were here
When my mom was
And we walked all the way
To the old boardwalk
Used by drunks
And families in the ’50s

I dodge another spine
Piano rags
Of wind
Dash mad through
The deserted air

Until money ceases to matter
And all backwardness is righted
And the people rise up
Who are “the people”?
Is everyone “people”?
A world where everyone
Is people
Aren’t the earned
Owed?

The ship there is tugging
A rope
It’s a long rope
Stretches to the end
Of time

Do they fish here?
I wouldn’t touch
This polluted
Iridescence
Let alone eat it

Him next to me
Says it must be tugging
Something its motor grinds
Its overtime
Its overtime?
Tugging overtime
Along the worldly
Otherworldly shore