Climate On Mars
Black shoes in a rummage sale,
two crows on a card table,
the day is a brown jacket,
the color is grass in December,
the sky so close it drips like plaster
just before a ceiling could go at any
minute.
A paperback sits third from
the bottom in a stack of twenty, Bradbury
perhaps; a crate of long playing records
is open in the middle to Elton John.
He reads the message in the margin
on page thirty-seven, she can’t wait
to lift the stylus to the last track
on side one;
neither is likely to notice
a sudden chill, how the dog next door
barks at the drop in temperature,
how far from April a woman pulls
a chair well over fifty, the way it usually
melts before it accumulates,
how it must be the radio
though it doesn’t seem possible
without any power, how they all hum
Rocket Man like the front yard of a long,
long time.
by Charles Carr
Twitter: @selfrisinmojo
Editor’s Note: The collapse of society is suggested through the disintegration of stuff (via surprising imagery) in this poem. The end yields the answer.
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