Best of Me

The air is shredded by a pulse like plasma, a branch of fire settling the complaint of polarization, shaking the heart of heaven. Thunder rumbling through the roof at dawn, the white dog barking half-heartedly at the sky while the yellow dog works at sleeping. The sudden rush of a late-summer storm unsettling all the pillars of the firmament. Starlings burbling from the hedgerow, crows hectoring from the phone pole. Rumor spreads like plaintive fingers, dissent feathers forth from the very breath we shed.

Something too beautiful in this glut of dark gray clouds, something to precious in the cool turbulence of this hurried wind. Like the moments we hold in common, the raw community of love and violence. The immediacy that makes us realize that we have souls, that we are of this world, and only imagine our solitudes and our apostasies. The roll of thunder, the bitter kiss of black coffee, the gaze of rapture remembered and fixed with-in these bones. The endless whispered conversation of being, wrote in weather and in wing.

I am awash in the meanderings of local birds and beasts, the domesticated hunters and the free throated flocks all intersect with my lapses and my wanderings. From yesterdays hospital corridors, the smell of piss and fear and utility, to the cusp of fever and rebirth. The arthritis spikes, the dismal moral failings, the lightning and the music and the memories that make up this reflection of life and want and thirst. The rain comes, and I want to sit outside and drink in each breath flavored of ozone and rot. The rain arrives, and I want to sit in these native ablutions, billowing steam and smoke. Heaven breaks, and I want just once to make the most of all this weeping.