8/13/10 Thunderstorms

An even black swath advances across the sky like the sash of a grief-stricken protest movement. The curtain clouds run the middle of the swath, evanescent fangs that coil, evaporate, re-form. Behind, as if a terrible earth being gouged out by a harrow, as if a bee’s nest being poked, comes the upset, the storm, the ruin. Warm winds, warm rains of August, and the calm as the ruin approaches, questions forming in everything. Strobe and drubbing water, ice, noise and fury--there once were songs to appease the beast’s rage, some living still sing them.

My feeling heart rises with streaks in the air, throttles these with the wind—twigs, fences, plots, artifices, stolidities. Limbs we scarcely suspected crumble to sawdust, elm crowns twist off like jelly lids, twigs litter the empty places, and someone is still at peace. Across the city a supposed power goes out. But, the real power is this—accepting with grace the assault, bending as if you were born to it, born to its beam, its loops. It’s as if the wind is writing a story in cursive across every street, every park, every stronghold, and like us, it knows how to weep.