Seconds to Thunder
a descriptive poem
Seconds to Thunder
5 seconds
From the waiting room window,
the northern sky is a blackboard
with its chalk erased. I am running
through a field of May corn,
popping from furrow to furrow.
The black-coated sky inches forward
lighting up like a Halloween sheet.
At the end of the row, corn-leaf-chafed
and raw, a bull-dozed plateau rises
to thunder
practicing its beat in the clouds.
4 seconds
Blossoms parade at my feet, and buds fall
in a torrent
like overripe cherries.
I am half of a battery, positive
and this is negative. We
make sparks. Light
green leaves of the earliest springtime
chase another stem. Footsteps
of a giant echo closer.
Near the spring, the earth weeps
and embraces my heels as I pull away.
The air above me in the valley
whistles and whips, but I,
in the calm beneath the eddy,
eye a gunfight beyond the curtain.
3 seconds
The first drop bursts like rotten fruit
within me. Then another
and another until I am sick.
Fields of hay shuffle
like a palm has been swept through the tips.
Twigs and leaves slough then fall away,
trees bald and slouch against
the growing wind. Each drop craters,
pools together and worms
down the hill.
2 seconds
Gumdrops of water patter my chest, my lids
squeezed as I lie in the road, face
raised to a churning sky.
The black dam in the sky will break, water
sheet at its seams.
No longer remitted, its sirens
scream in the dead of its belly.
Electric sizzles and shines through the cracks, lightening
all the visible world to whiteout.
I count to two, and pop clatters
nearby. I watch the floor
of the sky as it rends, waiting
for justice to be done
in, for the curtain to fall.
1 second
It comes like the sea.
I am underwater.
Lights flicker like nightclubs above me.
Its sheets climb over, its wet fingers
invade, finding black holes
and soft creases of flesh.
Another crack is coming, a collision of skulls,
of doctors and loved-ones, of children
and figures I only know from dreams.
Flashes like a muzzle have fused
the unparalleled brightness of seeing
into globs of jelly-like light.
I am immersed. Air is a myth,
put forward by those unmolested, clean.
The ground and the sky become one
unbroken plane. Water bounces,
suspends in bursts of liquid light.
With one final blinding crash,
the count has reached zero.
I call this a descriptive poem, but it’s also a few other things. An emotive poem. A negative space poem. A bad poem? Well, that’s for others to decide.
“Descriptive” is obvious, but what makes it emotive? There is a subtext here that I’m not sure is obvious, nor that I want it to be. It starts with “waiting room window” and from there, tiny hints throughout that maybe this isn’t just about an approaching storm.
And why negative space? First off, that’s all the strange indents and extra spaces between words, but as to why? It changes the cadence of the words, the import they hold, the inflection they are spoken with. They introduce a void, a breath, a holding of breath. They catch the eye and make you study what’s wrong, what’s different. Not every poem should have negative space. Many, in fact, shouldn’t.
This one should.