Little Cloud

I don’t know what the weather is going to do. Big winds share the twilight with small snow. Over in the next county, there’s a funnel cloud, but it’s moving slow, and it’s not very big, only a furrow of fast air, just enough spin to show up on someone’s radar. A blip of scarlet purling across an expanse of dark green. It seems somehow lonesome, like a feral animal searching for food in an unfamiliar place. I can feel it trying to show us the bluster of spring’s intermittent thunderheads in defiance of the bitterness of winter. If it doesn’t get much bigger, I wouldn’t mind having it around, a tumble of fast air playing by itself down in the woods. I could feed it errant tree limbs that other winds would blow down and surplus pine cones that I don’t feel like using for firewood or decoration for my lonely hearth. When spring gives way to summer this cloud will move along, or maybe it will just stop spinning, winding down in a gentle way that won’t take down any trees or splinter any houses into piles of hurt and toothy wooden beams. In its place would be a tousled spiral of forest floor, earth made messy with weather but not so much that I couldn’t plant something there if I wanted to. Maybe trillium, or moonvine, or something wild and thorny that I haven’t found the name for yet. I’ll know that seed when I see it: no need to search. These things have a way of finding me.

©Laura Sorrells 2009 
all rights reserved

The Limnologist

She conjures forth bubbles

of fire from frozen lakes.

I heard it on the radio,

circling the dark lanes

of a parking deck

at dusk. A big blue

Suburban nearly backed

into me as I listened to her

talk about the flare

of methane against

the Siberian sky,

just above tables

of dense Russian ice,

and how she freed

the gas from the face

of the invisibly

percolating lake. She is in love

with “the power of water

in its frozen and

unfrozen forms,” and she

unlocks it, standing back

as it lets her have itself—

a propulsion of conjured chemistry,

beloved and unsettling,

a threshold of flow, an ascent

of alchemical liquid strong

enough to free boulders

with the rise of its release.

©Laura Sorrells 2007--2012

all rights reserved

Incoming

The twitch begins behind my left eye,

the dusty one,

lazy in long hours.

Prepared to wait it out,

I gather myself

into shadow and sheet,

drinking in the firings of

each throb

and wanting

a deeper dark.

Finally I surrender to

those bending furls of purple

and lie with the music

of this clutter,

stilling the hurried rush of blur and trailer

into a settled space of gritty warmth.

Sleep dispels the brightness,

subduing it under a collapsing wooden dock

so that it settles down on its knees

in fishy mud,

browning away

from that shuddering muscle

of weakened sight.

I dream of thick glass,

old-world pirates

with eye patches,

and the gray tabby hand puppet I played with

when I was five,

the one with the rip in her left ear,

the one who heard

(and saw)

my stories.