Poem

Elemental

Dust and leaves swirled around my feet

In the middle of a summer cyclone.

My body was buffeted but I hardly swayed

For even the wind ignores the likes of me.

I went for a morning swim in the big surf

Off an abandoned beach,

After everyone else had joined the evacuation,

But the roiling ocean refused to get me wet.

When the house was burning down

I doused myself in gasoline

But couldn’t feel the heat

While dazed gray ash fluttered against my face.

In the middle of the earthquake

I was the only thing that didn’t shake

While the walls all collapsed

And the sidewalks cracked.

For I was the fault

And the eye of the hurricane

The tenth of a degree before the flash point

I have been the empty void

That flees just as it gets filled,

The vacuum of space that exists

Only when there’s nothing there.

I am the low dark clouds that promise to make mud

Of your finely raked pile of dirt.

Just you wait!

I’m coming for you, to devastate

This bonhomie of false tranquility.

You were the cataclysm that unmoored my ship.

Our thundering hearts remain as aftershocks

2/16/20