Sheltered by concrete
Sufficient against nuclear attack.
The sun is a wet rag, breathable.
Dishcloths, dishcloths.
Paperwork arrayed in legions.
Asbestos heat.
A siren howls against the air conditioning.
Midnight is a countdown for morning.
It is a myth, George tells us -
The sun has nothing to do
With the mounting oceans,
The cracking ice,
The mountains sweeping away villages.
It is all in the mind.
I seem to remember
A bright beach white with the silica sands
Singing the sun into brightness
As my naked feet
Tranced across the surface
In a foreverness of blank heat and ocean.
But perhaps that, too,
Is and was and will be
All in the mind.
The sun song a brief lapse of sanity.

In the cicada's season, down at the Cove, we watched
The long swell which banks the summer berm
In tangles of scintillating mica, cracked shell,
Black seaweed brittle below earth's kikuya swell;
Blue-blazing Pacific and polarized sun.