In a photo with the wife and children of a longtime friend,
female-fringed and subdivisioned, familied
by borrowed brood and camera-conjured breed—
fall’s just arrived and hastens to its voted end:
the rains have come, the creeks have surged, the bend
in 40 out of Asheville, flood-freed,
washed away, a candidate teed
off somewhere in Eastern Florida; we’ll send
more soldiers to the Middle East and hope and pray
an aged incumbent won’t forget his teeth
or self—last night I read that just thirteen
percent of the oceans are wild yet; today
I woke in sweat; I’d dreamed I swam beneath
all light, blind and crushed and very clean.