It's that time of year again: hurricanes rise out of heated beds of seawater and arrow toward the Gulf Coast, wide flamenco skirts whipped to billowing and swishing—their frothy mass like lace coming apart in tatters. People will board up store fronts and ocean-facing windows, pray that this year won't be worse than last. But rain fell for the first time in recorded history at the highest point on Greenland's ice sheet—and still, scientists say it's probable that this is a sign of global warming. At the bank on a Friday afternoon, the woman helping us fill out payable-on-death forms has a demeanor both cheerful and practical. Under the sleeves of her robin's-egg- blue blazer, on one wrist she wears a fitness tracker, and on the other, a medical bracelet. And we understand— none of what we're there for is necessarily morbid: we're only trying to limit some of the unknowns and probabilities that those who survive us would have to struggle through, if we didn't take this opportunity to prepare. We don't know what ancient viruses might even now be waking up beneath melting glacier waters, their crags once silvery as the hair on my mother's head. I can't know if I'll ever see her again—not through a screen— in her lifetime or mine; or if I'll dance in the arms of my love to celebrate the passing of one or two more decades. But after we sign our names on the dotted lines and walk back into the burning afternoon, I tell myself this is what lightness must feel like, after shearing off one more thing.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.