Cicadas

Cicadas

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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.

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