Heat Lightning, and: Crepuscular

Heat Lightning

Storm windows rattle and fall out of place. Clouds move in.My daughter turns a small house upside down.

The idea of rain comes. Then light. The widow at her door,her plants hung off the side porch. First a long drought,

and then fireworks. A little dog up against the chain link,howling. July Fourth, four children die in Missouri and Tennessee lakes,

electrocuted by a line running out for a lighton a dock, some charge carried down a houseboat’s pontoon.

Was there music playing? The obituaries are too factual;the elegies, too romantic. My daughter turns her house

right-side up, the tiny people fall out. Midnight or latertwo days ago, someone drove their car into our neighbor’s house.

A bed moved across the room. A window bent like a willow.Today she’s out in her flower bed dividing lilies.

Anger somehow has a certain charm with roots.All these years, and we can never thank her

for anything that might grow. There are curses,and there are blessings. Things happen, you see,

and then they happen again. I have nothing decent to sayto someone in pain. I hear a child scream up the road,

an old tire rolls down the street. A storm moves in,the sky blossoms with light and shades of green gone gray,

but no thunder follows. Still we wait for it, our eyeslifted and held there. Sometimes it never comes.

Crepuscular

In the book an owl flies through the night,settles in for sleep at the rooster’s crow. “Backwards,”

my little girl says, flapping her wings until she disappearsbehind an oak cabinet and dream. In the haze

between fall and winter, a sky meant to snowbut not snowing, the boys filled an old Chevrolet

full of comforters and pillows, took it out into a fieldand crashed against one tree after another

until the radiator was spewing antifreeze and the birdshad all flown away. There’s nothing left to do

but burn it, they thought, and the turtledoves cooedwhile flames carried that car to some heaven

of demolition derbies and salvage yards, the silhouetteof the steering wheel against a flash of light.

It takes less time to take everything apart.The guts of an old bathroom, the rusted tin off the barn,

the player piano my brother and I went atwith axes, my father swinging a sledgehammer

until the noise was so resonant and variedit went into that place where noise ceases to know itself

anymore, other than some hum, some exhale of griefor joy that settles back down to the floor.

Outside the stars are everywhere,and I smell smoke. “Whoo, whoo,”

my daughter calls out to the owlswhen the windows go mirrored and dark.