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.