February 12, 2013

love in the time of hurricanes

The weathergirl can't help herself. Some great storm is always rumbling off-shore,
gathering good speed, and she stands before the screen and makes dramatic gestures
with her hands, her voice rising in pitch, the sense of urgency potent. Already it tore
through the benign geography of a peaceful country, so who knows
what it could do once it hits here, she insinuates, eye dead on the camera, and an image zooms
in for emphasis and warning, the landscape battered past recognition, a lone house standing
in the wake. But I can't help it. I picture the clinging remainders in those rooms,
a floating vase of flowers, a dress still married to the rack, an irreverent radio sanding
the silence with fragments of static. An insistence blinks into this ruin, half-grief, half-wish.
The beach returns to its abandon. The water teems with hungry fish.