bottoming out in shiner-black.
The clouds have taken
on the suffering
of the week before
with a bemused detachment,
each one curling away
from the harsh legacies
with its own leer, its own
portentousness, with a severity
that scabs all the air
in foreground and background.
Slight dome of a dune
and the tone of its basalt
shadowgrass scarecrows
reiterated in the distance
by a bleary black hillock
on the western horizon
and all the clouds
humping their way
towards winter then or some other
remarkable catastrophe.