The scene filled to suffocating. Too much toxic rain, 
too much toxic sun. Toxin in every stone. The chaparral 
dense and today very green, set bright against the heavy

clouds. Mourning, the world fills with tissues. Eat, cry, hide, 
a memoirist tells us. Run, run, run the meteorologist 
shares. The world swells and drains, burns and dries. Eat, sleep, 

whine, advises the translator. Grief like that moment 
when the concrete divorces from abstraction and little cutouts 
remain. Shout, shout, rock out, says the painter. Gathering

like shapes made on dry concrete until it is wet concrete. 
Under shelter on a coastal trail, I overlook patches of silver
sea, consider other permeable membranes, of shipping lanes, 

silt composition, erosion. Eat, cuss, read, offers the hiker.
I look at eons, eras, mountains made from oceanic trench. 
Hmm, hmm, mm the pianist mumbles as he plays. In earlier 

centuries, historians wrote of seasons and cycles, harbors 
and the slow fanning motion of sunflower fields. They hawk 
hooks and order, the food chain and lies. I will never be

precise enough; tomorrow can’t be static. Eat, tweet, fuck, 
writes the poet, flowers spilling out of her van.