Forked lightning sears and stabs and stabs again.
The thunderstorm threatening all afternoon,
lowering and dark, has now arrived.

Except it didn't. It went underground
as some diseases have been known to do,
returning with a vengeance in our time.

One Easter, the last chords of our closing hymn
still buzzing in the upright strings of the Hope Church School
piano, our black-robed pastor, fresh from his sermon,

Sunny May morning; going through the mail.
Among solicitations, one stands out
from summer neighbors: a Conquer-a-thon—

The veil between the worlds is growing thin.
The grass is growing tall outside the door.
Who was that baby in the dream again?

I walk downhill and lean into the wind.
It is and isn’t the first time. Hour, weather,
errand all proclaim Now and Again.

I  Midpoint of summer. Horizontal light
   picks out the fly in the dusty web; mousedroppings
   fresh on my desk each morning; poems; letters;

Nowhere to go back to—they say—but there is somewhere to go.

Our plane has already been de-iced
but sleet comes over the wings again like a coating of dust
on the wide leaves of a rubber plant—

You wake and reach for the phone. No one is harmed 
if you call your wife to claim you have seen the Pacific 
at dawn, running for miles over the quick