Incognito
After the summer burn this rain so light
it evaporates before hitting the ground.
But summer isn’t over and far across the continent
rain is falling so long and hard that ground
is immiscible with shapes that will never reform
in the same way. To travel incognito is to abbreviate
part of the self to meet conditions as you imagine
them, or as they might be. Subterfuge or safety?
At a time when travel is inhibited, your incognito
is like living as so many others are dying.
I can’t speak of the places I’ve been when the sky
is turning shades of blue and gray, is fulminated red
or coping with breath of rockets in all their
deployments. How can a book end when there are
others being written, and in this fact you sign
your hope: a signature you’ve forgotten but scrolls
automatically. How glib is the Doppler radar?
The rituals I’ve resolved are those for preserving
the house—not against but out of calibration
with ants, mice, and rabbits. The inner outer thing.
I diminish my vocabulary to expand my understanding
of these experiences of static and stillness.
A prognosis of native blue-banded bees which
have seemed absent from usual places this year.
A psychoanalysis of absence. A dereliction of cause,
a tribulation of effect. “Doomscrolling” events into ellipses,
that state as opposed to graves that are memory.
How we hear the galloping disaster. How we tune in
and out. Our jump-cut vision. What we conceal and what
we know. No franchise, no spoils, but new notes for return flight.
