Tag Archives: hurricanes

The Blackout

The streets are filled with idle, itching hands,
their owners on the prowl in vain pursuit
of some pastime to fill the vacant hours
in darkened rooms enswamped with summer heat.

Without their cellphones, TV sets and games,
and fast-food fare likewise beyond their grasp,
how will the city’s folk be entertained?
On what diversions will they spend their cash?

Driveways are strewn with fallen trees and wires;
on front lawns, baking in the noon-day sun,
we sit in wrought iron chairs, and just perspire.
And wait. There’s not much else that can be done.

Who wants to light a flame to cook a meal,
and add the stove’s hell-fire to this malaise?
It’s better to go hungry than to broil;
besides, the food’s gone bad. It’s been two days.

Tonight, the house is hotter in than out;
by candlelight, perhaps I’ll read a while.
I miss the air conditioner’s white noise;
Too bad such silence has gone out of style.

11 JUL 2005

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Through Hurricane Glasses

All these years spent riding the eye of the storm,
at the edge of the wind and the rain,
ahead of the weather, before it could form,
you’d think patterns would make themselves plain.

But the nature of the cyclone is spun from without;
subtle shifts in the slipstream can deceive.
You can read the cloud patterns, but there’s always doubt
that the nightfall’s what morning believes.

And the hurricane takes you to places unknown
that the points on the map do not show.
At the start of the season you’re out on your own,
for the doors are all boarded up closed

And the crux of the matter, at the cusp of the wind
where your sense of direction is confused,
is to not fight the current when you feel it begin
if you don’t want to end bent and bruised.

You start in the ocean, just a speck in the sky
building up size and momentum by the mile,
slipping under the radar for the first by and by,
then appearing at the curtain with style.

And the hurricane brings you to uncharted zones
that the guidebooks don’t often reveal.
At the height of the season, you’re there all alone,
for the levees and beaches have been sealed

It’s true, sooner or later, you burn out or make land
and the bluster slacks out of your sails,
ending up just some thunder on a few miles of sand
Filling gutters and storm drains and pails.

And a few busted windows, or a few flooded lawns
are the best you can manage to show
for the years riding shotgun, just carried along
at the edge of the winds as they blow.

And the hurricane’s dropped you so far from your home,
way beyond where the charts start to fade.
At the end of the season, you’re left all alone
with the wreckage that your trip has made.

09 SEP 2003

Maybe this one is about storms, but I doubt it. It’s more likely to be about those people around us who seem so wild and free, little caring about the effect the great maelstrom of their existence has on others – does the hurricane care about the shorelines it devastates, the paradises upon which it wreaks havoc, the homes it destroys? So like the hurricane are so many people, hurrying and hustling through their lives, bulls in china shops, leaving nothing but wanton destruction in their wakes. I’ve known a few. And I’ve often wondered about their purpose in my life — was it to discourage my attachment to mere material things, to a few precious valuables and so-called unbreakable commodities, and seek out things that the vicissitudes of this life cannot damage? Or was it to point out the very unstable potential of each of our natures, that finds expression only in random violence and senseless cruelty, and keep me from “riding that wind” myself, if only to provide a safe harbor for my own more landlocked dreams? Perhaps. I only know that I have longed to be a “storm rider” in the past, and surely have harnessed my share of lightening. Being burned is only half the story. As anyone who has spent a lot of time in the water will tell you, it’s not the current that ultimately gets you, it’s the exposure.

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The Crepe Myrtle

To see the stump there in the yard,
Its edges barely higher than the grass,
You’d never know the tree that made
A stand in that spot for so long.

You might, when seeing flowered sprouts
From that dead trunk, imagine it;
But unless you’d seen it growing,
For you there would not be much tree.

Imagining is not knowing.

To know, you’d have to see the way
It stood, for years, attempting height,
Pushing its branches to the wires
That crossed the lawn from street to house;

And one time, just to keep it free
From in the electricity
A man had come with a ladder
To amputate its reaching arms.

But it was already half dead,
Thanks to the efforts of a boy
Who’d swung a cruel baseball bat
Straight at its chest some time ago.

And though it bravely put out blooms
In spring and then again in fall
The termites finished up the job
And hollowed it, primed it to fall.

And then, the hurricane rolled in.
Although I could have with a push
Snapped its rotted wood, I did not.

It was the wind that brought it down,
With a loud crack, right where the car
Might have been, had we not pulled
It off the drive, safe from the rain.

I had to saw it up and lay
The pieces by the curb as trash,
Shave the split stump down to the ground
And stuff the hole left with spare sod.

Sure, it was dying, or near dead,
But it made a nice bit of shade
Against the kitchen windows,
And colored our bit of front lawn
With bright fuschia-colored blossoms.

Next to the old stump, a young tree
Is growing; we planted it there
A spring ago. It will not shade
Us all that soon, but when it does
We will have a far greater need:
For as it, like the myrtle did,
Reaches out to touch the bright sky
We will be slowing down and old.

It will be quite nice to sit down
In the shadow of that dogwood,
And remember the crepe myrtle.

23 AUG 2003

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