Even with the car’s A/C pumping
its little compressor heart out,
I feel my left arm burning through
the driver’s side window,
having left the cool coastline,
speeding just a little over
the I-5 limit north toward home
on the second century-plus
afternoon of the summer.

Next to me he says,
It happens, the one who is not
thrown by temps I deem too high
or too low. Get used to it, Janis,
which is funny from one native
Californian to another, one of us
a former lifeguard on a pool deck
that routinely hit 100. My idea
of a perfect summer day
is 90ish with a breeze.

But every degree over 100
feels like 5, and his Honda A/C
is not remotely keeping up its end
of a bargain it probably doesn’t
remember making, which to me is:

Cool when we need cool;
heat when we need heat
already.

Finally I give up, exit to locate
a chain diner with decent bathrooms—
but also, as it happens,
with struggling A/C.

Get used to it, I tell myself,
as if I’m not. Our hots are getting hotter,
our colds colder, and, as I first heard
from a high school biology teacher
in the early 1970s:

It just might be too late to turn this ship
around—this ship we didn’t build
but figured out how to ruin
in a century or so.

On days like today, I can envision
the ship of the world ending in fire,
not ice, which, as Mr. Ford said, might
not be a bad thing. Give the planet
a chance to recover once we humans
are out of the way.

Hit reset. Start over. Perhaps with new
beings who won’t be so greedy,
so dismissive, who insist it isn’t so,
who won’t be—please, climate gods—
like us.