Dead Air

Aug 30 2015

A blood-orange moon

glows sullenly.

Like an ember, fanned into flare

that will soon consume itself

snuffing out.

Even at high noon

the sky is hazily dull,

its brilliant blue smudged

as if viewing the sun

through heavy-gauge glass,

concentrating heat

subtracting light.

Dead air,

with the claustrophobic feel

of short-of-breath.

Has humidity thickened the air?

Is a volcano spewing dust

somewhere in the tropics?

Or is it forest

going up in dense black smoke,

flashing-over, so tinder dry?

I think of winter nights,

when the desiccated air

is like a clear lens

out into space;

every star, laser-sharp

in black immaculate sky.

But this air is unsettling,

suffocating, thick

malignant.

I sniff for smoke, ozone

decomposing flesh.

And wait for a stiff north wind

to blow it fresh.

It was the moon I noticed most. Especially since it was full. Yet all the conditions seemed ripe for a clear high pressure system: there was a northwest breeze, the humidity was middling, and a thunderstorm had already moved through, leaving settled air. So even though it was sunny, it wasn't: there was a haziness to the sky, in place of that hard blue infinity I thought was due.

It's a descriptive poem, without the narrative drive or human emotion or personal quality that make poems work best. If anything saves it, then, it's the first-person narrator. Of course, I didn't start out with any agenda -- any theme, or story, or deep emotion. I just wanted to get at that blood orange moon down on paper, and then let stream-of-consciousness take it from there.

It turned out to have a very claustrophobic and malevolent feel: there's blood and snuffing and dullness and smudged; there's dead air, thickened ...air, and shortness-of-breath; there's suffocation and malignancy and decomposing flesh; and there are words like heavy and dense and unsettling. So it works rather well that the final word turns out to be fresh; as if a single word could suddenly cancel everything out!