This morning the wind gusts grab my back porch
chimes and shake them like a terrier breaking a rabbit's neck
The sky, torn with broad swaths of ultramarine and
splattered with aqua, boils.
White rags race
The dawn is so amber that the bark and pine needles
look wrapped in colored cellophane
Shadows skitter across the patchy yellow grass,
hugging the naked hips and fingers of pecan and sugar maple
Shards of sun splinter the lawn, pasture,
tree trunks, porch posts...
But it is the sound that has me
Whispery sirens rise and recede in a cycle I cannot decipher
as old as the freezing and thawing of glaciers
Soft thunders
clearing and clouding
- silent for long moments
(like it will be when it abruptly ends)
then ramping up again to foam over; a rattling crescendo
I want to be annoyed; my reading and writing hijacked
But I cannot even form the thought against this seductress,
(She knows I love her)
So instead I let go of focus and drift
with the slow-motion passage
Plains of light and dark
- straggler leaves shooting past -
and sink into the cacophony
of battered wind chimes
and ghostly moaning
Sounds like the church bells of Poseidon
calling the drowned sailors congregation to prayer
Like shattering glass
and schizophrenic stair-stepping marimbas
Screams whispering,
almost too loud and high to handle,
like my heart will stop,
trying to follow her raw intensity
Somehow impossibly soft and huge,
an emotional contradiction; inviting and dangerous
Choruses of coyotes under the eaves
and at the edges of the siding
yearn to tear the house to scraps
She bellies under the porch boards in groaning gutturals,
bursts crashing the metal and glass against the posts
Suddenly squeals like a dentist's drill,
falling off into the distance
Some detritus of my recycling spins past the glass doors
- bumping and rumbling its squared corners against the wooden deck.
I want to dress now and go out into this buffeting glory
To witness the land's surrender
On the edge of changes
as big as the sky