To open champagne, hold the bottle
at forty-five degrees and it won’t overflow,
however agitated. I learned this
in Yountville, sweating under a sun
too hard for October, drank wine like water
and had to spend the night.
Asteroids brought water to our planet
in the time before marshes and oceans.
They hurtled across a sky
of implacable orange, the air brittle
and crackling, and splattered silvery foam
over crusty ground on impact. After
a night of spinning on its axis, imagine Earth
waking for the first time to a morning
that’s an ache behind the eyes.