By the time half the hurricane had passed, nine candles
had pooled in their saucers,
the cypress split in two above the Toyota. Before they extinguished
I could barely read Robert Graves,
and in the diminishing flicker “groves” became “gloves”
and the Caslon wavered on the page.
So in my reading it appeared the sacred gloves had closed around oxygen,
had twisted the weather till the cypress split lengthwise.
In the other six hours the Romantic was carried upstairs
with the clothes and photos.
Birds blown from their nests were dizzy trying to recover,
our once local insects were entering Atlanta.
So maybe the Big Bang was believable after all, maybe an axiom
might be married to a stove, pitchfork to pine sap,
any stair might be cousin to a ladder and the wormhole near the sill
emerge near Aldebaran in Taurus.
