El Niño
My windows buck in winds that shear
off the blue moon’s ocean. Poetry can’t
redeem the time, cellular time, the planet.
Ends and means concentrate in us.
The rain swipes and pats the glass.
I watch the world’s atomic force,
the mindless beauty of what happens.
The stringy hair of pepper trees, jasmine,
camphors. Name them. They beat in time,
back and forth, as if impatient with their lives.
Irregularity is the utmost pattern.
It thrills and menaces, shuts airports,
floods streets, rumbles my room.
I’ll wake tomorrow and still feel how
it shakes the mind of my heart.