—C. Dorf
This one, for instance, late afternoon,

droning into dinner time as a helicopter

roams the cornfields, dipping and rising

to spray–what? Nitrate? some herbicide?

Suggesting we name it The Lessons of Vietnam

Applied to Corn or Rounding Up Weeds

or How Sikorsky Found a New Market

or How Dynamite Led to the Gulf’s Dead Zone

or Whales Aren’t the Only Collateral Damage

of Mapping but this is to ignore the afternoon,

cumulus clouds building now, spilling

fractal patterns from each edge–little

and littler, the shapes of dwarf face,

ogre mask, dragon claws and tail repeat,

repeat–and the barn swallows skimming

mosquitoes from the breeze. The clouds

march across the sky like cattle going home.

I name this the Evening of the Anthropocene.