He stiffened a little on the treadmill

and gripped the handles while he tracked the screen.

The picture was a camera crew: their cameras

shouldered, they shimmied down a pile of rubble

left where the risen ocean clobbered homes.

 

This surge behind his watching as he watched

the ash reveal a skateboard, overturned.

The wheels collected miniature snowflake domes.

Maybe because full blast in his ear buds

Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes” rose and flashed on

 

breakers of alto cries and arpeggios or

maybe because the captions, lagging, spelled

“leaking reactor core” as the camera panned

once more to the slag heap. . . whatever reason:

far as the stars and right in front of him

 

sheer being surged there, in the light of catastrophe

that shone on streams of fleeing families

and lingered even past the commercial babble

(“Ultimate Connectivity For Less”)

while the treadmill beeped and shuddered to “Cool Down.”

 

And he remembered: in the locker room

he’d need to wipe his antifungal cream

around his torso, neck, as far around

his back as he could reach, then need to wait

ten minutes with his skin that smeary blue

 

and hunch on the bench, hang tight, embarrassment

tremoring through, as if dismay or fright

whose cause had fogged, forgotten. He would wave

to others passing there. Would tap his chest:

“Hey man. I’m blue today. I guess I’m blue.”