It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The
wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I
watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of the summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop.
They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the
leaves came
blossoms. For some
things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.
