The colors of passion are often mistakenly thought to be shades of red; however its true colors are black and green. – Sigmund Freud
The northwest starts hatching something so black
against it the landscape arches
dry, quarried out of chalk.
A squall-line raises the curtains
on this greenish gymnasium of sky.
I forget my dignity.
I live underground with the deer mice, listening,
all ears, listening, remembering
the real thing.
She called me to the west window.
The sky was like a war advancing toward us
ushering a freakish cloud,
a cobra, swaying,
tumescent, the sky’s gray tongue.
People picked up by extraterrestrials testify
how paralyzed they got, quivering
in the magnetic field of such pure panic
they were like the laboratory mice
we used to watch in the Bronx Zoo snakehouse,
quivering under the judicial scrutiny
of a rattlesnake, they could
they could
hardly move they let
its lightning tongue explore them. The sky kept coming,
these ugly remnants writhing in formation,
it was Biblical, the most intentional
sky I ever hope to see,
the sky armed with a gray sword.
The sword slid back into those low sheathes.
The sky charged us, it rode
over the roof and onward, east.
And around our shaky perch the curtains
closed, leaving us shuddering
in the shelter of each other
as if once more the world had spared us,
had left us only wet and harmless
as the birds outside
accepting the rain like the grass,
and the grass flagrant and greener,
more serious than ever.
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