This week, in honor of Earth Day, I’m sharing three poems that speak to the seasons, the way that they’re changing, and the ways they’re changing us. (“When the rains came” was first published in The Lake Rises: Poems to &for Our Bodies of Water; “Last Dollar Road” first appeared in Silk Road.)

I.

When the rains came

 

When the rains came each day of the season

and dutifully did our bidding,

we didn’t care.

 

We expected them there, like the strange angles

of the city, its trees,

to which we had grown

accustomed.

 

We thought no more of them,

than the fact of electricity,

wheat futures, whatever those are

or were, or war.

 

The rains came with lightning,

felling the trees and flooding

our basements, flooding the city

with light obliterating

stars.

 

They came with the subtlety

of pink darkness, cocktails of apocalypse
riding shotgun with storms,

those hot gases, the bitter breath

of our cars.

 

 

Then one year the rains failed,

and the crops, and the trees,

as if in protest, set themselves on fire. I remember,

we all stepped outside that day, wondering

at that ominous cumulous, some portent,

had appeared above the smoke.

 

II.

Endless Summer

 

I do not care for the arid artifice,

of overlong sun.

Some may.

Some may lie,

the way my Canadian grandmother did,

out on the patio with a smoke and a soda,

soaking up the sun’s rays.

Some may lie about the numbers,

the way dictators do when they want to

look better than they are—

but these chemical exchanges on high

with absolute fidelity are factoring

X and Y, and I, for one

prefer the rain

to the dead heat of these late days.

 

We’re all sunny day real estate down here.

We’re into what’s hot.

Australia, for example. California.

The Southwest.

The Southeast.

Drought is the new black.

Black is the new white.

 

We’re not all that bright, is what I’m saying.

 

That lucky old sun,

just swinging around heaven all day,

has finally turned its face our way,

as if to say, what is it you’re doing down there?

And we, for all our dissembling,

will soon be hot with shame.

When that day comes, we’ll be like sunflowers, finally:

unable to look away.

 

II.

Last Dollar Road

 

The sky was giving way to stars

when I finally found

a patch of ground to pitch my tent

out on Last Dollar Road.

 

Gathering in the aspen as the day gave its last,

I remember, that downed wood

broke in such a faithful way, snapping hard and clean.

I have been waiting my whole life

to break like that.

 

Wrapped in a blanket, shivering,

before a hungry fire,

I sensed restless spirits like animals

beyond the perimeter of the light.

Gathering in the thoughts that circled me—

who I was, who I wanted to be.

It was so cold that night I had no choice

but to feed every fear to the flames.

 

And I’ve never been more clear, more free,

more cradled in the palm of a place, I knew,

that could kill me.

I’d pitched my tent at an altitude

indifferent to my survival,

had none of the luxuries

I now consider essential. Which is to say,

had a summer squall swept the mountainside,

I could have died, maybe, at twenty-five,

in southwest Colorado.

 

No one knew where I was, exactly.

But I knew where I was, exactly.

 

This is something I’ve since forgotten,

living indoors so long,

within, that I am

willing to remember tonight,

walking in the wind:

the way winter lives in everything, and what it means

to burn.