You, technicolor,
have no fears.
You, in lights, the water is
invitation to Europe,
Europe, who now comes to you,
not bashful at all, you are,
Europe comes to you.
The thunder doesn’t make
anyone look up, like rabbits,
or wonder where the
cat carrier is.
Back home it means
fearful times of
tiny footprints on the
ceiling of “I could be,”
“it could be.”
Once I was in a school basement
and I was the teacher
I told the kids there was nothing
Another teacher said, “Come, see,”
and I stood on the still workout room treadmill,
to see better: red on the Doppler.
They said take cover.
Two weeks before, a whole
town we had heard of
was sucked up and
spit out in chunks and grains
that no one wanted to find.
My mother worked where that tornado
blew past,
it did nothing,
she was on the top floor, on a hill,
and it did not come for her,
or for us,
the kids with khaki knees
up against their chests
along the lockers.
Here you can’t even see the
lightning, for the buildings.
Lighting is birds,
birds are lightning,
the white electic man who
says, “WALK,”
Birds fly into windows,
lightning flies into windows.
People speak or
don’t speak,
of when it hits.
The lightning comes back
to say, “There is the land,
there is land,”
like the bird did,
“there is the land,”
after the flood,
as birds did to say,
“this is Jesus,”
as lightning brands,
tornadoes fly.
The thunder means,
“Oh, home,”
to some midwest transplants,
to me, it means not home.
For water, the water
of outside tornadoes,
the water of floods,
the transplant of water,
bone clouds, ideas of bones,
to bone water, to the
broth of right in this hand.
My mother’s skeleton hand,
the spit out of what filled
the mouth,
the first cry from your mother,
the people who actually believe in
gods, thunder, and
tornadoes.
The immanence of what’s raining,
will get to the skin.
Once I was in a basement with my
aunts, uncles,
great aunts, great uncles,
cousins, cousins removed,
second cousins,
we played on the ne’er used
workout equipment down there,
a way to hang upside down,
like a bat,
an elliptical machine,
while my one aunt from the coast
wanted to hold her children
by the shoulders,
we had never seen her
wanting anything,
“This is all the time,”
we said.
It was all the time,
charcoal basement,
indoor-outdoor carpet,
my little sister,
stuffed with fear and
sewn up.
In “The Wizard of Oz,”
the twister was made of fabric,
great yards of fabric.
In black and white,
we knew
“I Love Lucy,”
our parents’ little bedroom set,
and the start and end of
“The Wizard.”
We knew Lucy
trapped in the freezer,
our dad told us it was funny,
he was right,
it was not funny that Ricky
and Fred couldn’t cook,
though, our dad could do anything.
In color, we knew animated
“Robin Hood,” the foxes
and the hens,
robbing the rich,
and Super Grover
changing into his cape
in an underwater telephone booth.
Really, New York City is black and white,
the buildings, the bridges, the water,
and Kansas is color,
green, green lawns forever and on,
or, west, toast gold, on and on.
Europe doesn’t even see Kansas,
No one dreams of it.
Image: Firedog, After models by Alessandro Algardi, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
