The Seeding of Clouds
On July 21, 2022, The Guardian published an interactive photograph taken by Nasa of Lake Mead’s “extreme withering.” By swiping across the image from Then to Now, readers could witness the dramatic decrease in the lake’s size between 2000 and 2022.
Sweeping
my cursor across Lake Mead,
I
draw a curtain of time
so
the water contracts
from
its former blue-black coves
to
the present twig of cyan
deep
in a serrated basin.
Who
will be the first to bottle
the
last? Like the vial
of
Mount Saint Helens ash that quivered
in
my teenage nightstand
among
Bics with prized-out safeties
and
a sheaf of creased letters.
In
one, I’m forgiven
for
needing to “find”
myself
then promised to be loved
forever.
Perhaps we should seed
the
clouds and force
rain
back to the rivers –
act,
not cede to irregular
billows
of relief. Only
all
these years later,
rereading
her surrender
to
my fleet, uncertain love,
have
the tears finally come.
Nothing’s
left to save,
though
the foolscap drinks them up.
Optimism
A
fingernail is never enough
to
scrape sticky tack
from
paint. It lingers
till
you use more tack
and
daub blue specks away.
Unmarking
walls before we move,
I
think how I do the same
with
fear – draw it from my body
only
with more fear.
It
could be worse.
It
could always be worse.
Neil Surkan’s most recent collection of poems is a chapbook, Ruin, from knife|fork|book. He is also the author of Unbecoming, Their Queer Tenderness, On High, and Super, Natural. neilsurkan.com