Flash Flood
I was making dinner, peeling radishes at the sink, when afternoon suddenly turned to pitch, and hail graveled against the windows.
Water rushed down my brick street, waves slung over the lawn—whitecaps in the garden.
From the porch, I watched sear-white rods fasten fire to the water. My spine bristled and I wondered if I’d been hit.
Evening cut loose as liquid. The strong sense of sailing away.
A grey sedan, stalled in the lake of my lawn, held a woman waving, window down, her voice sucked into the storm.
Do you want me to call someone? Lightning broke wild around my words and I felt like a powerful god speaking in pointless thunderbolts. She held her phone high, pointed to it.
Later, those two women or two other women waded down the street through knee high water, into the remnants.
From this water come electric snakes, chemical blooms, the new world.
The empty silver car bobbed against the palm on the boulevard.
Later, inside, I lay in clear cool water in the old green bath as monks sang the Ordinary— struck by music’s aqueous pauses and silvering—until we lost power.
* * * * *
Between Storms
I knelt on the burning driveway pavers and pulled strangling weeds from the low hedge, heat from white roots spiraling up the veins in my arms.
A whistling man rode past on a foldable bicycle. As he did not see me kneeling on the ground behind the hawthornes, I experienced myself as an animal.
When I wound straying jasmine tendrils around the arbor I discovered ten thousand shining red ants, rubies with high crimped legs.
Making dinner, I noticed a letter from my mother, 2004, dropped out of a book of recipes. I wish you could forgive the terrible events of the past. You used to be a good person! And her drawing, by her signature, of a single teardrop.
I folded and stacked soft clothes, still warm from the dryer. I held them to my chest. I did not put them away because the path was not yet clear—evacuation suitcase? Dresser drawers? When? To where? To whom?
* * * * *
Return
From the airport, I rode in Bat’s Taxi to high ground an hour inland, to retrieve my car from my ex’s garage.
I let myself into his house with the key he insists I keep.
In his tiled dining room, I studied the painting he made of his old dog. I loved as I have always loved the carrot floating over the dog’s head, shining.
I took my car from his garage, drove around the manicured neighborhood, Tampa Palms, in effusive air-conditioning. It was good to be cold.
At five p.m., I picked him up from the university. We ate red curry on rice, strange good mush. We spoke as former lovers, kind and concerned, laughing, close and far apart, with some unwieldy wanting knocking around. Not enough.
Before dark, I drove the long way home, somehow surprised to be alone. The evening sky was smooth silver, like a shell. I saw many tire marks along the sidewalls of the bridge.