when the air is angry like that, all dripping with heat and thunder and coiled-up lighting —
when the rain comes in like artillery fire, and the windowpanes might crack —
when you despair of the paint on the car you parked last night in the front yard grass —
when the air is angry like that —
too angry to sleep or to let you sleep —
when the dogs in the boarded-up house set up a howl at a moon who’s fled from a sky she can’t bear the sight of —
when the air’s so angry the moon can ache,
those are the nights you lie awake
and shake
with heat and thunder
and a coiled up lighting
that refuses to strike
— it’s like —
— it’s morning—
sun, hot, washes away what’s left of the flood; only a droplet now, caught in the praying hands of a leaf of ivy.
remember those hands and how they tended a field of ivy that grew by the house you lived in once.
recall that the ivy is gone, and the hands, paper thin now, are folded in a lap that does not remember
remember —
when the air is angry like that
all heat
and thunder
and coiled up lighting aching to strike —
remember to rise
follow the streaks of moonpath to where she sits alone in a field of ivy
watch the heat bleed from the angry air
and the thunder roll away
and the lighting uncoil like a garden snake who slithers off to regard you from beneath a flat rock.
Watch anger fall away like years
and lay your head on a bed of leaves
silvered now with tears.
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