Red Clay Weather

Seize the Day

—75 Seize the Day The light in this city is summer slouched in classic attitudes. It slaps the face, hunting down a home in every brick and pore of the it-won’t-stay-for-long, a year of ghosts forced into fiction. Air’s violent poetry is saturated with salvation and heavy rains, silt fills the mouth instead of words, settling into red clay gullies erosion scrawls down mobile slopes; black plastic fences try to hold the roadside in. Presume you, presume me, forget: the buried rhyme of poverty and pollution has killed off so many pollinators, this green butterfly or moth has followed us from one house to another, tracing the vanishing margin of safety: a berm of purple flowers lines the driveway. The holly bush makes its complaints known through thorns on every pointed leaf, the prevailing local toxins lie in welcome, make you look through these lush and poisoned landscapes for an exit. The texture of evidence pinched between two fingers or scratching the passing cheek, the living grit that scars, illuminates the war against appearances. You pause to hear the picture postcard yards and lawns, listening at six and then eleven. (News is a desperate mystery, isn’t it, shepherd text-2.indd 75 11/22/10 2:07 PM —76 the paradox of dead light staining morning air, drenched in unasked questions.) You learned early how to tell lies as if you were human. shepherd text-2.indd 76 11/22/10 2:07 PM ...