AND THEN EVERYTHING WAS THE STORM

A village siren did not exist to start startling us to the flood,
nor would one make us distrust luck to prevent it reaching me.

The deer running away made the dusk dulling the eye shine
amidst the heaps of overturned trash  with banqueting buzzards.

An indifferent moon had soothed the sunburnt arms of visitors
who had not thought they held tickets to a deadly raceway of water.

An aviary display of confused birds aligned on telephone wires
took off all at once like those assembled in Hitchcock’s story.

Headlights of escaping cars float their glint on a sudden rush of
water in what was a quiet river that now swept along trees

near the deserted parking lots, trailer clusters, and summer camps,
where a few hours before friends had gathered for a night’s bar-b-que.

And sometimes those headlights, broken one-eyed cyclops, targeted
a leaping stag before the lights expired, replaced by lightning strikes.

Those  able to wade to safety waited for the next day’s light
to reveal what would startle even the old at such new absences.

Racing overhead, cirrus clouds of accumulated water in the
heat could not hold the buildup of rain that now spiraled down.

Apparently a cheap wall calendar dropped page after page
as penciled-in weeks rode the brown water with photos and toys.

Empty hopes left together as we tried to screen out what we all
knew was coming, but maybe every fifty years or only each century.

And the wild flowers along the highways and those in the gardens
that opened for each day’s bright morning had now closed forever.
_____________________________________________________________

PHOTO FINISH

The photo I found in a plastic frame
was a close-up made by the boyfriend
of a rich girl who generously left me
a set of Hitchcock chairs taken
from her family’s heirloom barn.
Her beau, balding and too friendly,
had three cameras dangling
around his sunburnt neck
that endless day we stretched
on a beach of singing sand.
I was wearing non-tinted, rimless
glasses, and turned my head
to the dark, blinking eyes of
each instrument he aimed.
The image itself, like any process
of creation, could not be trusted,
as a property of lens and angle,
shrinking me to a visual story.
I understand more than before
those religious people who
shunned such ghost-catchers,
knowing it was so dangerous,
and each snapshot to be feared
in the dots of gray worrying
away the flesh fixed on paper,
in time without any reference
to time, true but not really
accurate, or accurate but
not true, like chaos when
the picture breaks apart,
indistinguishable from plain air.
Looking across fathomless water
we wanted to see what God
sees, but what does God see?
We had not replaced God,
only refined our all-seeing eye
in a solid sense of ourselves,
but were forced to face at last
things we prefer not to look at,
trying to control the universe’s
response, like anything we make,
even the careful crafting of love
I burned as completely as the photo.
_________________________________________________

ON THE VIGIL OF ALL HALLOWS

On the vigil of All Hallows
a tailfree, fuzzy comet
made us face the sky
as this omen’s glow burst
by a factor over a million,
not from an unknown nova,
but an object leaving our space
into a welcoming darkness
with a final, gaseous flare,
like a sign of our own good night.
Along the village byways
children hunting down treats
at the gingerbread houses of strangers
held flashlights to bathe their steps
and chanted a rote threat.
They dressed as fantasy figures;
a hint of escape and longing
clings to these flat imitations.
In time they will wear the subtle
costumes worn by their parents.
This hallowed night the parade
of original innocence
keeps at arm’s length
the spirits “roaming the world
seeking the ruin of souls.”
They await another time.

In the first light my car,
coated in sugary frost,
displays on its locked trunk
a design, a childish squiggle,
a mask of Potatohead,
a clown, or a continent,
and a child’s hand imprinted,
an enigmatic token,
like a palm on a horse’s flank
from an owner riding the prairie
or the perfect ochre outline
on a cave’s smoky vault.
The warmth of that phantom hand
had melted the ice glaze
and left a record of touch —
a blessing.

Royal Rhodes is a poet whose work has appeared in literary journals in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and India. He lives in a small village that is close to a nature conservancy, green cemetery, and Amish farms.