Rapture
I.
Ghost
Over the Sierra crest
Spectacular clouds above the
Owens Valley
Altocumulus lenticularis,
appearing any month
Over the Nevadas
The steep slopes where trees
live centuries, branches
Wind-tipped seven thousand
years
Tennyson wrote, yon whispering tuft of oldest pine
Unbeheld, unheard
And yet
High in the White Mountains
the Methuselah Grove
The wind burning its trees,
their driftwood coils
Whitened glassy to the touch
Over the Sierra crest, the silent
limits
Falling as the snow falls
II.
El Niño
Fishermen
First observing, every few
years, to their shores
The Infant
The beginning
Off the waters of Peru, the
Southern Oscillation
Drake, the Straits of
Magellan
August 1578, the voyage
chronicles noting
A storm
Lasting two months, the Golden Hind blown ocean-motion
Dark red shows the rise,
degrees Celsius
Sea surface temperatures,
typhoons, Kelvin waves
A new season
The
fishermen say, precursor to events
Reaching
III.
Yucatan
Not
head-on, rather
Approaching from the
southeast
Perhaps thirty degrees from
the horizontal
Impact plasma of ionized gas
Arcing sun surface,
incandescent parabola-shaped
Kill-zone, ten
Kilometres per second
crashing on to North America
As far as the Appalachians
Molten
plume continent: just outside
The
corridor of extinction, on the last leaves a little dust, then
Everything
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