Weather Curve
Iridescent flies are writhing on the driveway. We set up our chairs to watch, while the crows, in uneasy groups of three, keep up their guttural mutterings in the cedar. Who hasn’t reached a point when they don’t care who’s watching, and aired the open folds? The system is swinging north. It will miss us, sprinkling only a spell of restless sleep, our minds not free of the idea of it: People are standing on the land by the lake, shouting to the people in their boats in the lake about what they can’t see behind them. The children ask why the ride home seems shorter. The unexpected, too, unfolds slowly. Who hasn’t missed what they weren’t looking for, and petted the Black Widow’s eggs tacked up to the underside of a chair? Falling faces, such things have been creeping up on you. The system is red in the center, undulating in and out of an oval as the animation tracks it north. Men keep their collections in the basement, in the lower-level sheds, the ever-dank relegations most prone to flood. So taken are they with anger and love, the crows skip their ritual proclamations on being spared the storm. The driveway flies are spent and they blink, dissolving the mist into the salty southern edges of their eyes.