Hurricane. North Dakota

The morning the storm breaches
shore, on the television news, wind
surfers hinge their bodies to sails,
pink and yellow running along
a brackening of sky and horizon,
and one says to the newscaster,
“We’re not crazy,” squinting against
the sheets of rain and camera
light. “You know, it’s the only way
man can fly.” And later,
after the reprieve of violent low
pressure, above the spit of chain saws
and limb shredders, rise stories
of returning to a world no one
left: the one heirloom preserved,
the good national guardsmen
who ward away the looters, the litany
of frozen meats gone bad, the newly
uncaged conures and amazon parrots
of Florida that scatter upon the areca
palms. All the colors return aquatic.
Thus, of the hurricane season,
I think of you, my love.

Or more true, I remember
North Dakota, where wind suffers
itself no long, desirous stillness.
Somewhere there, in a field
risen with prairie grass, light
two macaws upon a cottonwood tree.
This tree is denuded but for the midnight
curve of these birds. I have
to think of such things, because
you have left this Idaho
or that North Dakota, because simply
you are far from me. I have
to think of such things, as unreal
as the starry faces of those escapees,
to think of their feathers, blue,
freighted with African air, of how
crushing it is for the exotic
to have any resiliency.

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