I'm going to read short poems and a few of them
have a little narrative, mostly they don't, mostly they're
lyrics.
The first one has a narrative, it's called "Hurricane."
When his father says, "Think before you speak,"
it's like telling a clown to be serious for once,
like telling an actor to freeze long moments on a stage
and reconsider the lines he's memorized,
like telling the color yellow to tone it down for the funeral.
The boy is 11, it's hard to think with a noisy rain still
coming down in buckets.
Last night a hurricane slammed the street, and in the morning
the boy's uncle stopped by in a canoe, waving a paddle,
and big trees were upended, everyone
could see what made a tree a tree.
Across the street, in front of the pharmacy with his friends,
someone's blond and beautiful visiting
older sister leaned down and kissed them on the lips.
All stories explosive as a storm or ordinary
as a walk, lose in the telling, lose everything in fact.
The lips go slack, the clean smell
of the small puff of breath dissolves,
his uncle is a man who works in a garage, what's
left is a great noise in the night that
took all the other noise away.