CLOUDS IN MY BACKYARD

TV Dallas once said hurricanes coming/Take shelter.

I watch tornadoes die in my backyard. They meant tornadoes. Dumb screenwriter. Dallas is too far from the coast.

Gray, black-tinged cotton, lowering heavy atmosphere ready to drop.

On me, not really so safe lying in the grass in my backyard. Watching. Eyes dazed even now by the sun hidden in there somewhere. I squint. Flinch with the first crack.

Thunder. It rolls over ground like bowling balls, knocking air out of its way. Wind assaults the dry grass, begging for water, and then whips my face red.

Cold, ice-laden in its thoughts if not in its stroke, it sandpapers me, then dies.

Too cold for tornadoes.

My backyard sky is an art gallery of clouds and of unmarred blue and of black menace hurtling down like the hawks that eye my cat as they float overhead.

And sometimes I can still see the sun set. Pink and orange and red, mostly hindered by my neighbor.

Sunrise or sunset? Sunset. Slow as slow until the end, then gone, then minute by minute more stars reveal themselves, and the moon, where she sometimes is.

Dying over living? Rest. It is over.

“That will do, pig.”

A very old poem of mine. Here is the cat 

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