A Deeper Misunderstanding

 

Pieces of pinecone at the back of a dresser drawer

Amidst loose coils of socks that don’t fit or lost their match

There’s a sound sewn into the breeze from the dark outside the window

Like the echo of a dog bark broadcast over the radio

It ain’t nostalgia

It isn’t naïve idealist meandering juxtaposed

Against the harsher grit of test result truth

Just a feeling that floats in every so often, on its own

Schedule down its tried familiar route

Like a somewhere’s summer something days’ parade.

 

The way that clouds smudge the moonglow

Create black paper cutout shapes of all the trees

-- the way the afternoon sun polishes

The brown-green glass of the river

Until it shines and hurts the eyes if you catch the glint directly

Like halogens off of beer bottles

Or a memory that just woke up.

Flickers of wonder we absorb in the

Spare seconds of life

In spite of the sound of the clock

Ticking down the seconds we no longer

Have left.

 

All over town, beyond and throughout

From village to city

Brownstones bearing worn out reflections

Of the other ones across the street

Streets of houses haunted by the

Specters of past presences

Entire histories of human beings reduced

To echoes in time and dust-flocked

Fingerprints on Goodwill shelf clutter.

 

Driveway to driveway there’s a distance in the air

A space not defined by the volume of ozone

But by bones discovered that nobody

Buried there

Mystery skeletons strewn between mailboxes

So folks get busy and obsessed piecing

Together a creature they never knew

Drunk on nostalgia juxtaposed against

The harsher grit of bank account balance truth

Something you can’t see right

Permanently out of focus like an electric dark blue light

It opens us all up to a deeper misunderstanding.

Stormfront, U.S.A.

 

House is quiet

Trees are still

Tall grass standing frozen as if

Trying not to draw the notice of a swaggering mower

Sound like a stone quarry off towards town

— A storm is percolating in the west.

 

The de-icer blue sky decays

A clotted gray-green, thick fungi on the afternoon

The smell of dirt in the air

A humid held breath;

No lodge prattle

No song of insects, susurration of frogs

or gospel choir of birds

The quick stink of burnt ozone

and a shockshow of lightning rattles through

flexing flash with a warning to nature:

“You aren’t tough enough to deflect, we’re here

Under the highest authority.”

 

The first fistful of droplets on the eaves

A herald to the blitz

Suddenly silence followed by a

Tornado wind and

The clouds purge, liquifying the landscape

Shattering trees and ravaging all they're expected

To nourish

As if every angel in someone’s heaven

Were power-pissing from the other side of

The gloom in a contest

To see who could cause the most irreparable damage

For the sake of getting away with it while cackling

 

And they’ve succeeded in breaking up all

The driveway basketball games, leaving

Swing sets only to be ridden by the bullyish wind

And as the town gets battered down

Folks are cloistered in cellars and sitting rooms with

Discomfited stares and

Crackle-clutter radios

Keeping away from the windows and

Wondering aloud how friends and neighbors

Might be faring as if someone in the room

Were in on the show and knew how it would

All play out

But mostly talking to cover the thought

Looping beneath their hats and hairdos –

“Will I live to see this end, and if so,

Will there be anything worth rebuilding when it does?”