money fled the neighborhood
like a swallowtail let out of a bear trap.
as we walked under the bridge
two river logs startled an arrow
of crows into traffic. new heat
hung over the county like a skin
on raw milk. always hard to analogize
a vanishing future— a precocious child
becoming a cartoon ghost, 20% of
the atlantic's plankton dissolving
as i lay my hand across your shoulder.

there is no interesting way to write
that, 50 years ago, a handful
of company executives decided
to suppress research that suggested
fossil fuel extraction might end civilization,
so i write the rim of the sunset darkened
above us like a cloud of passenger pigeons
above the lethe as a stray paws
for the field mice that live under my porch.

you said i can't tell if what's missing
is what’s lost or the idea of it
having been here. we both imagined
the apartment blocks on either side of us
collapsing into the hum of imported insects.
a snowy egret's plume lifted over the bosk,
hemmed at city's edge by the highway,
as a beaver sideled through
tangled reed and mallow. the stream
made a bend in the crook of your elbow,
phosphates in a sheen over smoothed shale,
none of us growing old.