History Doesn't Cycle, but Apocalypse (Signs of the Human Condition) Recurs in our Recollection

Douglas Olds

September 9, 2024

@cyrilbphotos 

It's 2-1/2 hours after sunrise, and the sky continues to darken. "the marine layer [fog] underneath a layer of heavy wildfire smoke has created this ominous scene: an orange hue and darkness that makes it feel like [pre-sunrise] hours." The fog is keeping the smoke aloft so that the air is breathable, but the sun is blotted. Wind shift forecast for this afternoon should blow off marine layer, so that smoke will descend.

Sleepers, Awake! (Douglas Olds, 9/9/20 at:

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10158701809138139&set=a.77780573138

[more images at https://www.facebook.com/SFGate/photos/a.136110725593/10164243043820594/?type=3 ]

They're called election year "cycles."

My post linked above from 4 years ago today came to mind, as I awoke this morning after my ebbing bout with my second experience with COVID to the smell of smoke from the Line Fire 300 miles south.

4 years ago: COVID's anxious milieu amplified by a strange orange day from sunrise to sunset and the sky that never changed hue or nose.

Today, the hue has changed, but not its nose, and vector of smoke has clocked from north to south. An omen for politics? No, I don't believe in them. But I do apocalypses for the human condition, and their object lessons basing spiritual recollection of a day "hoping that the sky stays dark so the air stays breathable."

And so my poem of that orange apocalypse outfit my recollecting this COVID recovery morning:

*San Francisco September 9, 2020*

I. Apocalypse harbored:

Remember skyfall, that end of summer still-born dawn?

That sky— once looked to rainbows—

cast a crucible, birdless and ominous, forged by wildfires—

carboniferous vampires--and

Like before a hurricane—flag-limp space, and this sunset

A prospect blanched never greening, resonating but faded to scorched amber.

and damp sticky miasma smeared like grease to grass-hosted palms

Holding the pen that attends this drama of dying shop

running emp(l)aced.

In ebbing ticks, we by cloud castles of whipped sand construct

diversions for hollowed-out courage

so clocks, in this narcotic smokescape, ever fade from sense.

II. Sunfreeze

2-1/2 hours after sunrise a still dimming sky.

Under the cloaking ash from up north,

That marine fogs may stay saddled to us and bridle this apocalypse,

that leaves us panting such as comes with smoke’s descending, as

under a statued Eos’ painted by agora fire our logic will surely sickle a new fix,

Else Shiva pipe us a new redoubt.

Yet today the neap of steady alarm we will sleep through:

this day’s dawn is its sunset frozen.

III. Rahner Whispers

not arrow drawn by Mars’ bow whose flight intends none but

a stranding vanity, a vacuum,

fluting through Zeno’s box canyons unechoing, impotent

for the unrecognized flooding now.

But Thy Kingdom come’s assertion is ripening, we sniff for it amidst this foul condition.

IV. Eternity Now

Duty is the eternal present breathing.

Presumption must not but abide its hope.

No dance can a global change for us prepare;

Rather now is our ear reeled by children’s lament of the marketplaces,

and our duties no longer allow eterne’s neglect:

the present corners of streets and wildlands wheezing sweat.