Still Life with Twister
A six-mile swath – must it always
be a swath? A scythe. Arbitrary.
Picture an unwound scroll,
twisted over itself here and there,
dangling to an end somewhere
x minutes later on a road map.
County names in black, generic
font, slight sheen, and back-
ground of that watercolor
yellow.
Sharpen the focus to splinters
of trees
of sides
of houses snapped in half,
garages sliced cleanly and removed,
shingles sliding neatly down,
the furniture within standing
still poised, tea-time get-up,
untouched look. (National Guard in camouflage, Red Cross vans circling,
handing out Ford-donated gloves for our
the floor, a goldenrod linoleum, Tasks Ahead, doughnuts and coffee
now white, covered in this sheer and Gatorade in the mornings,
dust – from where? salad and spaghetti and bread at noon,
a man in boots who stomped through each
now-borderless yard to tell us to come eat)
clumps of pet fur float listlessly over
too, sucked from beneath
the fridge and oven (three mornings after now and State Farm still
hasn’t shown)
the digital is out.
it is No Time.
the air is duller
and fluctuates less
about the ears.
there are little boys’ toys (plus innumerable scraps of roof, drywall, now
in our yard that my mother wet and crumbled, insulation, bird’s eggs, pale
can’t wash and give to her wash of blue, brown speckled under caked debris,
granddaughter, next to the stumps, under halved pine trees,
she jokes, crying minutes seven of the eight trees down in back, counting rings:
before 32 years old. “same age as you, Mom.”)
and after
too, trees impaling (morning to afternoons spent picking up this debris,
the neighbors’ house, robins sitting on the stumps, quiet.
(where the twins we babysat eggs next to stumps, under halved trees,
used to live), by the former-fence rubble, in the middle
garages and kitchens of the yard.
entirely absent.
“I found a bird wing!”
most absent: all “Oh…
the trees. I found a whole bird.”
My sister instructing me to put the eggs by the upside-down
nest under the standing pine. She’ll bury them later – only don’t turn the nest over.
The male starling sitting all day in the apple tree
under which we had found his mate that morning
(he sat there the next two days, too)
And the landscape, the silhouette is so changed,
I don’t recognize the setting of the photos of my niece
taken in our shaved and skinned backyard
when my mother shows them to me months later,
and every time we drive back there I forget I must
- I’ve failed to - retrain my eyes, my memory,
until I see the treeline go.
Originally Published: Landscapes, volume 2, issue 3, 2004