The Times Asks Poets to Describe the Haze Over Seattle
No one asked me, but I would have said this apocalypse
looks like home. The laureate
says a grey gullet has swallowed
a molten coin, another calls it powered cadmium
and cirrhosis, dystopian, grotesque, a crematorium. Yes,
all of these describe my Delhi, and which
of my well-meaning friends will understand
that for a week now I have woken to the warm nostalgia
of exactly the familiar cataclysm that hangs
there every day as I imagine Hiroshima’s
mushroom cloud might have done before dispersing into that dead
silence? Every sunrise and sunset so brilliantine,
and like the finest earth-to-table restaurant a new recipe
daily for the fresh soup of toxins, the plastic mill, the pyre
ground, the matchstick factory where every day five year olds blow off
fingers. There has been no blue
for years. No, these are not things to be proud
of, and looking up at this brown smudge of a Seattle
sky I know I should look away, feel for evacuees and ashed
homes and bear and deer and antelope, but
in the confusion of entanglements holding my life
together I cannot say what’s catching
in my throat, am I now animal remembering how once I would run
in Delhi, laps around that little brown park
with its mongooses and illegally grazing buffalo, before the haze
pressed in, caught into its creep my blackening lung
and squeezed, or is my animal
brain transported to another home on days outside
those twenty-one per year I am allowed
to be my other self, exhale into just another no-different
anonymous body, or is my animal howling
to dam the forgetting when breathing clean so long feels like birthright,
blowing down all those accidental animals, of whom I
am one, whose water is hauled from Cascadian streams where no one
may so much as dip a grimy toe, whose children will never leach carpet-factory
mercury into their bodies, is my animal screaming
blue murder that if some can’t breathe
then none shall breathe, my asbestos lung rasping
to anyone in this town who will listen— this is how the world
lives. And there is nothing that cannot burn.