Hurricane’s Wake

For days the sticky green cocoon hung,
spun on a rusted black leaf of porch rail.
Tree branches sat stacked high on sidewalks
as men in their hardhats trucked up the street.

I worry about my dog. I want her to listen,
to live unleashed, to hear an engine fire up
and know that sound means danger.

This morning I opened the front door
to a monarch dead in a colony of ants.
I didn’t see the colorless cocoon,
torn open—the dead monarch a spectacle
of marigold crushed, wings wavering
with indifferent wind.

Down the street the men hammered,
buzzed saws that severed birdsong from my listening,
dog from her inspecting the slender colony
in its methodic dismantling of the monarch.

Against this quiet destruction, men
clanged and clucked on rooftops torn open
under the hurricane’s green-black sky.
My dog took to pacing, her eyes fixed.

As if she could see the din, she started
toward it, her tail billowed like a battle flag,
as if attacking would make it stop,
and all I could say to her—It’s okay. Stay.

Moon in Which Nothing Happens

We call it a Super Moon,
this perigee syzygy, this closeness
and opposition. Its barren light fills
the fenceless yard as the dog snuffles
peanut shells tossed by a stranger
whose been passing through—
a newfound quarantine pastime—
on these longer, darker nights.

Unlike a coin, a sphere has no flip side,
so it’s strange to think of Earth
as having an other side—
where the sun is shining
over China’s Great Wall,
where the day’s light is unraveling
like toilet roll startled from our hands.

It’s strange to think of a trespasser
skulking this open yard, discarding shells
he’s sucked clean of their salt
while everyone here sleeps,
dreaming of childhoods when we’d turn
stripped cardboard tubes into telescopes
and look closely at the moon—
a haven, an escape plan,
a land we thought we’d have
settled by now.

The dog in her hunt triggers the light
the neighbors installed last year for security.
It does nothing to keep her out of their yard
where she’s now hunkered and hungrily
tonguing an abandoned nut.
The light keeps no one safe.