Poetry Pollution

It should be a trivial thing, these changes in weather, this turning of the leaf of the seasons and of the turned season's leaves. Somehow, it's not.

Last week Summer seemed to be bored at last with its luminous play here in southern California and took off into now sunnier places; on Sunday the temperature dropped ten degrees or more, and winds arose, and it was overcast.

Climatological forces just shy of climactic; cool gradients that tilt one's perceptions of what has come before and, with luck, may come again.

Whenever one of these changes occurs, I think of bad poetry inspired by autumn, of the fact that universes of people since the dawn of consciousness have experienced seasonal transitions and probably half of them have tried to capture their responses to these environmental changes in some artistic way. The origins of literary endeavor and storytelling, some have speculated. With those thoughts, awareness of the endless clichés in these types of musings, images and sensations that have ceased to represent real experience and weigh upon us, instead, like a morass of clouds, almost equal in their force to experience, but entirely disconnected from it, sequestered from us by the complacency of their own artifice. Global climate change caused by pollution, sure – but what about the pollution that is the poetry of climate change?