I can’t let go of this image of North Carolina November sky.
Clean as a pantone chip.
Also the precise shade of existential terror
wherever in the world our raptor drones are hovering
for all the tiny humans living underneath.
Note the separate venting of the room and the under-works.
No longer visible: the electrical connection
that fed the reading light and the heat lamp.
The list is not from a flawed chamber structure,
but from the shape of the hole below.
A backhoe is so much faster than pick and shovel,
a few minutes instead of half a day,
but far less precise with edges.
The foot of snow that landed Saturday last,
collapsed in one day into the still-warm soil
and melted over the roof edge, from the sun above, gas heat below,
its escape arrested temporarily in the still-freezing air.
The changes from decades of slow decay, the changes overnight,
are mocked by an image of empyrian lucidity
that clouds can cover in an hour,
no longer perfect but neither so frightful as before.