The Poems of Our Climate Change

By Robert McCarthy

Mellow marrow, good morrow. Calm before
the cytokine storm. Blood-red, a sparrow,
fixed to its bone-hollow tree, singing
of tomorrow in his hawk-ravaged nest.
But his song, I think, is not for me.

This landscape, rooted in some agony
of extenuation, absurd murderous distance;
blindly tendrils groping in underground
odysseys of aquifers, tapped out in arid exhaustion.
Sunken beneath carbolic skies, the ghosts,
the imbricated beds, of extinct rivers
remember passage, inscribed in plaque-scabs
aglint with needle bones, salt crusts. Fire-stunted
limbs of reptile trees wag in whipsaw winds.

The Colorado’s surge is red mud, bled-
off at points where pine-beetled conifers
have slid down mountainsides, scarred trunks
comprising improvisatory dams.
Of the mythic origins of waters,
teardrop pools remain. Dry river-mouths shout,
titanic, at stunned, ensorcelled seas.

The violent remainders, the leftovers—
unraptured lumps in the gravity gravy—
clutching their flesh rags, their stumps, have fallen
back down the dry water-slide. Gross-bodied,
they limp to this diminished place, where
cloudy water lingers in cracked commodes,
and each cell sports, in lieu of window, a pinned
horizon, and white carnations in porcelain bowls.

Robert McCarthy is a writer living in New York City. He prefers to use formal means to achieve lyric ends. Mostly recently, Robert has published poetry in The Alchemy Spoon (Summer 2020) and Dreich Magazine (S3/D4, August 2021. His work has also appeared in the Fall 2021 issues of Yours Poetically and Neologism Poetry Journal.