Tornado Warnings After Dinner With Your Family in Indiana
Wind suddenly pewter-dark jazzes an American flag
on the porch across the street. I think things
are going in circles already, but your cousin
says wind from the Northeast never brings twisters.
At the cottage we've rented, you open the cellar door,
find a flashlight, turn on the TV. The picture's granulated,
the weather map too small to read. You shrug,
say we'll hear what comes if we turn off the AC,
that you never had AC when you were a boy
and didn't feel the heat. You say children didn't feel heat
before air conditioning. But I remember nights so thick
that everything seemed the discarded garment
of a ghost: limp curtains, sheets too damp to pull over me,
the hall light slinking under my bedroom door.
I checked for nuclear war on a red transistor radio
hidden under my pillow. Even now, I don't believe
in simple midnight, in all that's really outside: crickets
reeling out song, wet grass that catches in my sandals.
Hours later, blown awake by timpani and explosive rain,
I have to read until dawn. There may be no sorrow
my watch will ward off, and practice in being spared
does not make for faith. You're hard asleep, used to funnel clouds
that sliced the roof from your high school, second-floor floods.
You believe in exactly what comes tomorrow--
bright, harmless fog that clouds the windows
as if something enormous had breathed upon them.
Blind old Mercy yawns, stretching her arms in the new light.
[Previously published in Lily and in Christine’s book, Zero Degrees At First Light]
Christine Potter is head moderator of the poetry and creative prose
forum, The Gazebo (www.alsopreview.com).
Her poems have been published in Pedestal, Eclectica, The Umbrella
Journal, Stirring and others and in her first poetry collection, Zero
Degrees At First Light (David Robert Books, 2006). Christine is a
recovering (retired) high school English/Creative Writing teacher, and a free
form DJ at RandoRadio.com, where she broadcasts "Cocktails with
Chris" live every Friday afternoon at 4 Eastern time. She lives in New York with her organist/choir director husband in a very old house on a creek with two
cats who essentially run things around there.