In A Mood
This night a dark wind blows, cuts
through the clacky trees, edges set
one against another.
Somewhere a branch bends. Somewhere else
one breaks, the sound like a shot, a hot light
in the shadows.
I hug my sorry self and it's my own bones I feel.
I grit my teeth and squint to make out
what lights are on the horizon, but I can't tell
if something's looming or receeding and
which means what or what's worse.
The screen door's come loose. It goes
bang, bang, bang in the wind.
*
posted by tearful dishwasher at 7:31 PM
2 Comments:
Somewhere a branch bends. Somewhere else
one breaks, the sound like a shot, a hot light
in the shadows.
There was a terrible ice storm in Kansas City in the late 1990s, I think it was 1998. So much ice accumulated on the trees that, all over the city, branches began to snap under the weight.
It was like shots, icy shots, as if all at once every gun in the city were ridding itself of a bellyful of frozen bullets. The cracks were followed by the sound of the ice breaking up as it hit the ground. Worse, somehow, than the sound of glass shattering.
We stood outside, my neighbors and I, under cover of course, and watched the years of slow, steady growth fall away. Each break felt like a little death, the loss of something sacred, or of something that has fallen just beyond the bounds of memory, never to be retrieved.
Took months for power to be resorted, deformed branches to be hauled off.
Lynn-
I have the same memories from Michigan, those glittery, encrusted trees exploding and exploding in the frozen air...
Thanks for this beautiful comment that says it all much better than I could.
yrs-
tearful
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