November
 Drier than it has ever been
 In its meteorological silence
 Red roses bloom
 
 In the year 709
 From the founding of Rome
 Ab urbe condita
 Our 46 BCE
 Julius 
 Great reformer, soon to be murdered
 reset the days
 To end the ‘wandering years’
 And its calendrical 
 Confusion
 
 Yet drift the days still did
 By 3, said Bede in 800
 By 7 or 8
 Thought Roger Bacon much later
 Until again, from that same
 Rome
 Pontifical proclamation
 Added 10 days to the year 1582
 In an instant
 So that anniversaries and birthdays
 Were missed
 But human order now matched
 The flow
 Of the cosmos.
 
 Yet now
  in November
 The red rose blooms
 
 Calendrical days do not veer
 But earth itself
 We reread the ancient apocalypses
 For the like of their
 strange signs
 Flood and hurricane
 Pestilence, war
 Melting ice
 
 Seasons slip
 False springs occur
 We untruth the world
 And hide from it
 Saying that it, not us
 Is fake
 
 And still, the red rose
 Blooms. 
 

 24 November 2019
 Cedar Wings Cottage
 Dry earth and cloudless sky

* Ab urbe condita, from the founding of the city (Rome), Compare the Byzantine ‘etos kosmou,’ marking its calendrical year from the creation of the cosmos. In similar fashion to the work of Julius and Gregory, the International Committee on Stratigraphy is considering a date for our current geologic age, the Anthropocene, most likely dating from the deposition of radionuclides around the globe caused by nuclear testing from the 1950s.