After the Storm

Perhaps, after the storm, our skin resembles fluid-filled blisters. In our eyes pooled with rain, everything dissolves. As the earth becomes one dripping soaked mass, blue commingles with yellow to form spiral streams into which any evidence of dryness slowly sinks down.

Maybe after the storm we continue to feel the wetness – a gleam that skims along the top of each grey cloudy week, legible yet discreet. When venturing out of our homes, thoughts of the rain at once soak through our coats and clothing, thoughts built of clouds stitched together by lightning. Something has happened that has closed the space that was lingering between a question and an answer. We walk in silence most of the time, eyelashes dripping, skin tingling, deaf to the voices of birds, breezes and insects carpeting the hills and grasses that flourish along the steep sides of the valley, focusing only on the full force of rushing water framed within this tumbling curtain of gentle sounds. 

swiftly astray

Perhaps by connecting words humans create sentences that inflate in unique formations depending on the mind and time. Evolving slowly and intuitively from a starting point, containing the memory of a certain quality of light, the words build in a process that moves toward an elegant unity and sense of purpose.

But maybe a poem without a reader is just ink, for as we watch the sun slide under the ocean we are reminded that reading the menu is different from eating the meal; that all is actually each -  colorful, energetic, and emotional - the river of living in full flood, and that even as we pause to scribble in wavering lines while fumbling for a foothold this haunting of eroding forms continues to assert hope and the possibility of survival.