The Fiscal Calendar for Global Warming

by Kirby Olson (November 2020)

Reclining Blue Nude with Straw Hat, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1909

The Pueblos are ovens in December.
The Peorians wear bikinis in February.
Fish fly in Gulf Coast waterspouts in April.
Birds are sucked down into maelstroms in June.
Rebuild the arks! Pink the parks!
It’s August, and Amish nudists embark
on a tsunami of shimmering heat,
as purple submarines inspect the coral reefs of October.
Policy reports are due by mid-December,
to encumber cucumber dollars for renewable energy.

But, like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego,
in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace,
Trump ignores the Paris Accord
and its craven conventicles,
held together by chic shieks and elephantine hierophants,
who sponsor blizzards to whiten desert oases,
and says entrepreneurialism and fracking will do,
while the left argues for solar and wind,
as timely as a clepsydra in an empty desert,
and about as telling.

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Kirby Olson is a tenured English professor at SUNY-Delhi in the western Catskills. His books include a novel (Temping), about an English professor who starts a circus in Finland; a book of poems entitled Christmas at Rockefeller Center</em>; and several books of literary criticism about ludic surrealists. He is currently working on a memoir of his time spent at Naropa Institute studying with Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast