Photo by Wojciech Bobrowicz on Shutterstock
When fear rises
I’m driving through a fog.
Home to public school, I
travel up and down hills,
the 45-mile-stretch
like an obstacle course
to test resolve.
I need this cloudy patch,
not as a puffy mattress,
but as an iron shield,
armor to keep
fear from taking over,
fear like punctured tires
draining all the energy
out of me before
I get going.
The fog moves
this way and that
like monstrous mutations,
mountain-sized mirrors.
I do not see the road
ahead. I hold on tight
to the wheel. The view
looks murky.
I slow down speed
rounding the curves,
check the impulse
to drive head
strong into the laced veil.
Breathe. Hold up the veil.
Let it fall like a marker,
the white line
in the center
of this country road.
If I didn’t have this fog,
if I saw everything ahead,
instead of what is right
in front of me, the dip
in the road would cover
me up like the bottom
dropping out from under me.
I look forward to this drive.
The fear rises early
in the morning. Thick clouds
of tiny moisture patiently wait.
I’m on the road,
following a moving map,
no shortcuts, no turning back,
once I travel with this guide.
“What counts
in every corner,”
the speaker writes,
as she offers verbs from her
grammar teaching, mental
notes from her long years
of linguistic knowledge.
She lets go of period punctuation,
because, at this place in time,
her sentences are absent,
like a moment of eternal vacuum.
Trying to gets sounds in her mind
onto the page, she looks down.
She has dropped her phone
on the floor, her words
no longer encased
in prepositional phrases.
Her hands shake.
The confusion of the unmanageable
chaos lingers like a life
span of errors printed on the page.
No greetings, she sighs,
an interjection.
An easy forecast of pain,
she senses she must carve
work into space,
write nouns to speak
the fear in plain sight.
Live for a time in the ugly.
Subtract the adjectives,
she says. Things will be clearer
once mistakes are erased,
feelings shouted out.
Leave the empty to speak
for itself. Pencil in—
in lower case—the unshapely
pronouns.
She knows the coordinating
conjunctions will come.
But for now, leave room
to shape the old and unselected
non-material day.
A Forecast of Severe Storms Today
Shorebirds glide in formation,
twice circling the water crests,
not ready to land in search of food.
They shape the sky like their canopy-laced
feathers cover the water bed
inches above the sea.
These little birds repeat their routine,
flap their wings,
while waves thunder
in rolls, crash along the shore.
Youth sport a volleyball game.
Feet firmly planted in the sand,
one player jumps to make a kill,
slips into a fall.
The volleyball spins
now that the wind
has picked up speed.
Adults inclined on sand dunes
watch the play.
Why does the ocean pay
no attention to the audience?
The waves roll, crest, break,
moment by moment,
infinite in movement.
The wind bursts with thunderous
roar whether anyone
is there or not to heed the call.
The flyover of the birds,
the symphony of the waves,
the orchestrated breath of the wind
keep on into infinity while
creatures, even in danger
of human extinction,
like the Ukrainian musicians,
tour across Europe in concert.