Caleb Klaces
Trusted Sources

or, Everything I’ve ever wanted to say, as recorded
in Environmental Research Letters 1, October-December 2006

A frankness of pretty and horrid life steeps a little pool
cupped in tough, splayed mottled green-pink leaves.
Cockroach nymphs fleck outer axils. Mosquito pupae bob.
Bluish-brown salamanders dissolve heavy-winged ants.
The whole business held aloft on a forest branch’s branch.
(I imagine like Liberty’s flame). Meanwhile, in what’s now
Chad 10,000 years ago senseless photosynthesis drove algae
to glim the wide lakes that glimmered there, time-heat-dried
to a deep sandbowl, which gets a wicked wind now, thickening
that air with dust: leavings of algal clot along with hard
spicules lathed in long-gone grasses are by satellites caught
streaking brown the blue Atlantic. Yearly, forty million tons
of it from the Sahara’s tiny navel airdrops in the Amazon,
which would be sludge, the authors say, without African dust.

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