The Storm (For My Mother)

My father was a skeptic
but a farmer. He believed
in impossibility —
waiting
for the Gulf Coast’s holocaustal hurricanes.
he’d cut the earth
and seed each fresh wound
with a row of curses,
ram the tractor into gear
and tear his land apart
to put it back together, me beside him
watching, my memory planted
with each violent season’s crop, ripening
as each acre ripened.

This was near
the Everglades fifteen years ago,
while I was a boy learning to live
from a man learning to die.
His life: the steady green profusion
of hot leaves devouring air and light,
sucking rain dark under wide steaming fields
with underground acres of tendrilous roots,
a pale brutal ferocity spreading its strength,
unthinking and gradual.

Mondays, coughing
blood
in handkerchiefs he buried in his fields,

he’d disappear, the high-pitched jingle
of a tail-gate chain following
toward Colored Town. There he’d bail
his field hands out of jail, tallying
that cost against their wages.
He’d disappear, leaving me to stare
at walls the early darkness hid.
I’d hear
my mother tossing into sleep, and often woke
at dawn from dreaming of her stifled moans
and turned my pillow over to protect her
from my tears. Then, watching palms
fixed against my window dawn,
I’d wonder what was wrong
and sleep again.

There was great preparation
before storms. When forty-eight hour warnings
came
he’d hire triple crews at doubled wages
—Puerto Ricans, Negroes, Whites, men
and their wives, truckloads of workers
laughing at first and singing, then anxious
as the thick sky’s clouds bulged downward
through the darkness, truckload after truckload
raising dust from each storm-colored road.
He did what could be done against disaster.
Every crop that could be picked was picked
—tomatoes, eggplants, corn or gladiolus,
watermelons — everything ripe enough
to save.
As I grew old enough
to help, he let me. I bent down
through the hours of song and through the sting
of rain, picked on through the hour of hush
before the wind, excited by the lull
as others whispered, “It’s getting time
to stop, it’s time to go.”
Then the wind
would start, and then the leaves belly-up, revealing each green bulge left to the storm.
As distant trucks coughed to life,
“It’s time to go!” And large clear drops
like fear fell, chilling our shocked skins.

At home our grass was flattened by the wind.
The ancient palms in front arched and creaked,
fronds flinging like the tails of rushing horses.
The boarded house crouched like a cat.
Wind held my door closed till father helped,
then, pressed against the truck’s cold length
and awkward, we crept past the garage to the
backyard.
Before we hid in the house, we’d take a leak
and watch wind make it spray for twenty feet.

This is the close time of candles, of windows
black with boards, their cracks blackened by the sky,
when windows are opened to keep the house
from exploding, and even his laughter is silence,
trapped in the dim fragile rooms of our home.
In this last longest storm, I am the candle-carrier,
checking every door and window in those rooms
the storm won’t let us use. By candlelight
I see rain flicker on the bedroom floors,
and roll up rugs as coconuts like cannonballs
clatter on the street. I bring us blankets,
pillows, sheets, and secret handkerchiefs
for him.

At night we sleep in the depths
of the house and I dream of my father, coughing.
His crops are ripe around him, tall and still.
Behind his back the sun widens and blinds me
as he coughs and crouches, coughing again.
Trying to scream, I am dumb.

I see his gladiolus
dying, the wreckage of 10,000 blossoms floating,
wide useless blossoms, ripe and flimsy,
drowning in the armpit-deep floodwater
of flower-shining lakes. The storm
has flushed out cottonmouths
and alligators, leaving coons to starve on stumps
and cypress knees or feed from the bobbing carcasses
of rattlesnakes and rabbits, their long black hands
meticulously walking the smooth surface
of a sky pierced, row on row, by phalanxes
of swordlike stalks, the broken harvest
of my father’s curses. And as these waters sink,
I come with him although he cannot see me
to slit the throats of pigs, bloated and black-snouted
their lips soaked back from white gums
and stained tusks. When the corpses
will not bleed I stand and watch his anger rip
while my blade, thick with gore,
hangs still and helpless. The stench
of vegetables and flesh is rotten all around us. He crouches against the sun. Above me
his black shoulders heave. One hand is full of light.
The other hand extends toward me from darkness, gently,
turns away my face and lifts my chin.
I cannot scream, my tongue is dead with fear.
I cannot see his face. Lightning
blinds the room: the storm is over
and I wake.

Father, your farm is in the hands
of strangers now and I, a stranger,
waken in strange rooms filled with your presence
as a sky after lightning is still filled
with the scent of light. Faced with glass,
dismembered by its seams, I see you
gaze at herons on a mud flat at sunset.
For years your shape’s been paralyzed
among palmettos’ silhouettes,
and now you cough. Tossing water
like a shower of fire,
a single heron stretches into flight
and through the burning veil of flashing wings
I see you kneel at last.

The living dark curls up around your back
and you are gone, the dark rising around you
as you bend to plant your blood.
But father, O father,
what silence.