Our Natural Colour

Dyed plums weep their original purple
into the secret spaces, finite security
is an avalanche-primed winter against the cold.

When did passports become chimneys on fire
sending their smoke signals sky high?

This constellation is a bedside emergency,
a salmonella evacuation of decency.
Stars in the wrong alignment are sickness. 

A starched wing creaks its way through the small hours—
salmon bloody themselves trying to get home.

This river in full spate is not the same river twice 
but hold on to its ways of finding a tunnel
through the gaps in the rockbed. 

We have to make the best of it, the very best.