Friday, January 29, 2010

Check the Weather Religiously

Check the Weather Religiously

Prayerfulness, reverence,
and a thrill sprung from minor anticipation.
What will the weather be tomorrow?
Consult the TV, an entire channel devoted
to simplifying what falls from the sky.
Luxuriate in voiceless animation.
The calendar is reduced to playing
cards, numbered squares inscribed with symbols.
Tomorrow, rain: two teardrops
staggered, overlapping. The day after
bears a cloud with petaled edges.
Temperature is shown on a graph, jagged
as a broken zipper. The future
is at stake, but with little risk.
What can I expect of air,
of atmosphere, of sky? The background of blue
on TV is pleasantly vacant,
bare of ambiguity: here
is what you can expect tomorrow
when you stand, face upturned to the heavens.

2 comments

  1. Glorious poem. I love the unique imagery and flow of words.

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  2. I like reading these poems and then, afterwards, looking at the image which inspired them. I think having the image there on the same page as the poem would influence my reading too much. Often the image is unexpected (and I favour lateral inspirations).

    I really like "The calendar is reduced to playing / cards" - weather as a guessing game, or tarot perhaps?

    It's interesting that Aristotle's focus in his Meteorologica is 'the heavens' in a broader sense (with no hard distinction between meteorology and astronomy).

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