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.