Storm
In the oven of an August field the heavy push of
summer air signals the storm’s arrival:
Aroused, the pasture shifts and lifts a thigh
under her high blue-black cover
and like the blood-blush bloom of hot-together
lovers, or a burst blackberry bleeding amongst
snagged brambles,
the nearing heartbeat drum of rumbling thunder
spells the end to nature’s warm and quiet slumber.
A rounded stillness; full and over-ripe;
a tender silence. She holds her breath.
Time widens.
Then spits the rain,
falling soft on wheat;
pattering dots spotting sight
dropping nervously like a mother-bound
toddling child’s first arm-outstretched
stuttering foot falls
across a carpeted hall:
Helios-haloed heavy-breasted virgin and evolving
child learning to walk erect;
behold the man from woman parted.
The summer-scented breeze breathes across her
sun-lit skin, soft back-hand strokes across
the fertile flesh of his fresh, wide-hipped,
firm-bodied mate;
a hesitant kiss nuzzles back her milk white crop,
she, coiled like Asclepius’ snake,
wraps her spiral self around him:
Nehushtan, fire-bloodied,
lifting herself high above the earth in helical hope,
serpentine temptation wound around and around
the living tree. Naked.
But smelling the Apollonian-stink of his hot rival
upon her, the wind trembles,
then pauses,
then howls out a hard, love-lost slap
of jealous anger and slighted pride,
banshee-like, against the sun,
against his turn-taking lover
And now; now, under a trembling firmament
broken, now
sky-spanning silver lines measuring
to high heaven fall flood fast and
force and spite Ceres’ matured seed
with thrusting fury;
now the clap of chaotic heaven is
the angry flapping of raping swan’s wings,
now the earth is pushed apart from the sky
and all her seas rolled back,
and his wide whole-mouthed breaths
crack back fingers of knuckle-boned trees
that plead, knot-kneed, Pan’s mad-god glory
across the darked horizon.
The cheated wind,
an exorcised devil exhaled in head-back
high-noted shrieking,
gallops across her;
strong and sodden;
hoofing through hair and cutting eyes, roughly.
Leviathan thrashes and churns his waters,
leashed to make our daily bread,
un-leashed to make it his own.
And all-sudden,
like the unexpected big eyed buck caught
in the look of a long barrel,
the white flare of far flung lightning flashes
hot electric across
the crashing black roof of the earth,
the sharp bitter sear and acrid snap
of Lucifer’s expulsion,
his cast down bolt of forever
falling,
whitens into silhouettes the uprooted hills
and the boiling seas of fields;
catching horse, sheep, bull, man and dog’s
shuddering haunches
in a great Olympian freeze-frame camera click.
And Gaia’s drowned souls, now swollen
to fullness, over-fed and pregnant to bursting,
wait out the storm.
Until at last the rain’s puncturing tattoo
slows to a spit,
And at last the wind’s shriek-owl echo
fails to a gasp,
And at last the thunder’s hollow war-weary bellow
dies its last death,
And at last the tattered shroud of the sky
settles into spent sleep
and loves again the bruised body of the earth,
wrapping it in bandage-tight slumber;
the storm’s terrible power
having been that first deep fresh kiss of print
on a new mint book,
opening his folded secret to the world
under trembling hands.