On Waking This Morning to See the Sky Blue for Five Minutes Prior to What Began Happening

the sea at Ashkelon swims back to the ocean, crying: who’s bled into me?

Tel Aviv skyscrapers wonder: will stretching
a bit higher get us beyond this? While far below, speck-folk cough and sweat, sweat
and walk, bmp-bmping into each other, o the new loves that form in the marmalade
of wicked heat!

in Jerusalem the 8m. dollar dome’s become little
more than a masterfully gold-capped tooth in a maw crowded
by glint-dulled crowns

no one can find the tankers in Ashdod port, but Negev sandbanks mingle and catch gossip
on the swirl with their southern cousins,
even if it is a visit on the fly

and high
in the hills of Ein Karem,
ho look!
the red-brick Russian church has vanished

phantom tolls clang at a sun that’s lost its blush,
paled to the ivory of an old skull that rolls
across a field of tiger lilies

at all this, the camel does not even shrug, just grunts and yawns, yawns and gruffs — where’d he learn to pla-pla flutter those two-layered russet lashes?
as he lowers his drool-lipped head on my driveway, and been-there-done-that sleeps

the day the sand, ancient, orange, blows in from the Sinai dunes

bonds with every open door, window, eye, clings
to your grainy-sultry day until

at 6.25 p.m., the blast —
sortie after sortie —
the color of screech owls, clouds fly in
and drop a cold shower