Gray rainbows in the nighttime irrigation.
Immediately forgotten.
Then I hear a child carry a tune in a whisper.
 
I was dashing through those ashen rainbows
immediately forgotten.
You could truncate butterfly to butte
 
and still get migration and a cumin route.
But not camel.
Not emu. Not Tuareg. Not a Russian garlic
 
dome like painted clove on steppe nor geodesic
ostrich egg.
Totally forgotten, til the child’s moonbow tune
 
whispered in what wagon, rickshaw, landau
rattled me to a carrefour.
I couldn’t tell the autumn from the drought,
 
crescent over Quonset hut, or put language
to the pulp that made me ill.
Inside the mouth of the water-flow monitors,
 
goblin goblin—robin. New World cicadas
that chant in parabolas.
A new address, a dryness, they stop. Focal chill.