An Occupation
The world will end in pink. Those clouds just above the horizon
burn like lanterns. Overhead the dark monsoon clouds move in swiftly—
with their terrible eye sockets and long
gray beards they are the faces of the prophets.
Then the light dies. The wind is hoarse with ozone and the dark
continents move together. It is rare temper for the desert
where mostly it looks
like the world has already ended
in an eternity flat and brown and the hot atomic white light of the afterlife. This
judgment is different: The air gets heavy, then sweet. Dust begins
to fly. Then the clouds dark as grapes…
Later in your life you’ll study the sky each day like me
an occupation
of the increasingly mortal. And small children
who see lambs and buffalos. Then forget. The birds have hidden,
east the sky is a mirror’s back. All this drama of light and air
before the drops come fat as berries, a few at first, then the roof
is roaring. I think of someone I’ve lost
how vast he is—how oblivious
to all this furious touching. My body
is his relic. My mind is all he was. If the world has not taught us
tenderness, what have we done, what will we.
Even the coyotes
have retreated to their caves. Thunder whip-cracks, lightning
flashbacks the desert, the houses on the mountain, the air an amethyst
blink.
The rain wants to drive itself into everything. I want
everything. Today in the mail was a letter about the legal slaughter
of wolves in Montana and how I can stop it. That was depressing so I went
out to look at the sky,
thinking there was no room for innocence anymore.
Thinking that some day there’d be no wolves, the rhinoceros extinct,
the elephant a legend, none in the clouds,
that this may happen in my lifetime. The air
was close as sweat. Toward dusk I saw the faint pink glow
at the end of things, my neighbor’s great mesquite against it
somehow delicate, a black lace. I missed you
and missed you. Then the rain filled you like a mouth.
