Earthquake Weather

Zara Raab

Over the Maacama,
storm clouds touch down on the hills
mottled as snake skin with cinnabar,
bluecrist and color of jade.
Creviced stands of pine form dark swathes
like sweat in the sleeping canyons––
the heat’s that strong today,
the wind hot, everything dry.
I can see to the valley,
its floor a flat-bottomed boat––
mills and houses and two men
against a truck, one of them––
dark, keen––might be my father.
Desultory, they smoke and talk,
shuffling and raising clouds of dust
mingling with the smoke of pipes––
insignificant, really,
to the billowing mill smoke,
hardly anything at all
to the clouds plowing the air,
nothing at least to me now.
Yet I might move from this heat
into cooler shades below
and stand with him where he smokes––
this small, dark man who more than
once spared me from consequence,
interceding on my behalf
before the gods, before the wrath
of Maacama cooking.

In memory of E.M.M. September 9, 1920 - March 24, 2011
This poem first appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review (2010)