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Report // David Francis

The air seems full of finely ground shell.
The more distant trees are smoke-colored.
Fall is no season here, nor winter;
cold fronts are squelched by squalls,
summer overstays, an obtuse guest.

The commercial world plays up the holidays
with their associations of climactic hopes.
Each year they further overlap,
speed alone cuts through the thickness.
Flat terrain stamps down the swamp

with its day-dark hollows and scummy illusions
dealing with which imagination poles
at its own pace, ideally, occasionally
with a companion, aloof in cold green.