Skin of Dust
Skin of Dust
Flying over the great knobby spine of the country,
rising up snow-capped and drifting,
I see her skin of dust.
And for the ten or twenty minutes
it takes to pass over, I can believe
in the curvature below, that it is
natural, growing and sloughing
as it always has, like the old reptiles.
And that I do not need to grieve,
this heartbreak, as the grids
reveal themselves, the weeds of roads,
the pit mine’s azure eye,
vacant staring iris of water,
the cigarettes of cancerous smoking coal plants
(“plant,” as if erupting grass, a jonquil!)
The awful despoliation
around the great salt shadow of Utah
and Nevada’s dead white bicarbonate lakes.
From up here, dinosaur earth greens,
skin ignoring her lesions, cancerous, terminal,
her rumbling gut, her gasps for wholesome breath.
A simple cloud floats over
leaving a lake of shade,
irregular as a carcinoma.
James P. Lenfestey is a former editorial writer for the StarTribune, where he won several Page One Awards for excellence. Since 2000, he has published a collection of personal essays, five collections of poems, a poetry anthology and co-edited Robert Bly in This World, University of Minnesota Press. A memoir with prose and poems, Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain, published in 2014 by Milkweed Editions, was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award. As a journalist he has covered climate science since 1988.