Pale Fires I

August—September 2020

The fires are out, mostly, in the streets,

just heat laying-on, thick and muscly

under ubiquitous blue moon, over outback,

too, where no beautiful thing shines

in lunar presence as before, and yet,

if desert could sense summer, then, like us,

of magic and memory, no angst and fire,

human heat, would roughage, sand and stone,

viper, creeper, corbie circling its dregs

for steaming dead flesh, wish, as we do now,

frost ice the blossom, winter shelter-in-place,

ground-zero cold-white glow become us?