The Storm

Adaptations: It Was Nobody | The Storm | Hardly Disfigured | Vowels | Sacred Defoliation | Him | The United Fruit Company

 

The Storm

                 after Montale

The storm that raps
the stiff magnolia leaves,
its long March claps and blasts of hail,

(Sounds of crystal in your nocturnal nest
surprise you. Some gilding
snuffed on the mahogany, gold leaf burnt
on edges of books—a grain of sugar
flares up again inside the shell
of your eyelid.)

the flash of light which candies
trees and walls and shocks them
in that eternity of an instant—marble manna
and destruction which you carry carved inside you
like your doom and which cleaves you
closer than love ever could to me, strange sister—

Then the sudden crash, the sistrums, the rustle
of tambourines over a shadowy Pit,
the rumble of the fandango, and overhead
some gesture blindly groping . . .

as when

turning, with a hand brushing your forehead
of a cloud of hair, you

waved to me—and entered the dark.

(Previously appeared in: Chelsea Review)