Glass: A Journal of Poetry Volume Two Issue One       

Charles Rafferty

Arizona

As with failed love affairs and night
traffic accidents, the explosion must
have grown more beautiful
with distance: the musical rumble
the Pacific might have heard,
the dust knocked into the sunrise
and deepening its color, the glow
of the fires persisting — a disaster
that could light a lover’s face
if there were such a thing as love
fifty thousand years ago. Seen from the air,
the Barringer crater is a dimple, a divot,
a scoop taken out of the desert
as if it were somebody’s sandbox.
But here on the lip of the catastrophe,
the shattered and scattered bedrock
is proof that the sky is closer
than we thought. It makes us look more
haltingly into the night above our homes —
full of grocery lists and longing
and gigantic TVs. We should live each day
as if something were falling
hopelessly onto our heads, as if something
were approaching that knew how to follow
no matter how fast we run.