Premonition

The smell of burning

is in the air,

is always in the air,

leaving our doorsteps

deep in the syllables of

forgotten language.

At the back

of every book consigned

to the funeral pyre of

inconvenient truths is a

glossary of things we

should know

to save our life,

and perhaps

our soul.

Although burned to ash,

the words remain in the air

we breathe,

in the dust beneath our feet:

they are the ancient

encyclopedia of apocryphal

thought

woe, woe,

chants the mourning dove

with each day's warning:

what is bred in the

bone of earth does

not disappear

from its flesh.

ice remembers

its former shape,

dreams a return

to liquid

glacier feels itself melt

from the inside

out,

knows a fissure

finds, first, its heart,

and grows it

ten times larger.

continents recall

whose shoulder

they rubbed against

in once upon

a time.

wind remembers

'The Great Dying'

how to scrape bone

white as ash,

reminds us

there are deserts

where we can walk

for days,

and hear only the crunch

of ancestral bones

beneath our feet

volcano hibernates,

feeds

on stored memory,

wakens,

to vomit megatons

of fire,

enough to bury

a Pompeii or Herculaneum,

in sixty-three feet of ash.