Forecast
Julie Hanson
Monday: turning partly cloudy and quiet. —Cedar Rapids Gazette
I suppose on Monday after school, a lone boy
might turn and see the clouds move in and cross the sun
and sense that something is about to happen.
And some others may suffer premonitions,
however non-specific—a veteran whose eye
travels always to the far and the peripheral,
and some among the elderly who’ve learned to listen
to their joints and to their injuries. And the dogs,
all of the dogs. And anyone observing a dog
will notice a change in its ears and face and stance.
As it comes to us, this quiet, which of us will know enough
about its methods to identify it?
Will it come down on the fields and streets and lawns
only, or will it enter the buildings? And gradually,
as a shadow grows across the patio,
or in a sudden second, all sound shut?
Will the quiet seem a blessing, an interval of peace
—a let-up in the wind in the ear on a walk,
a pause in the piped-in music, in the lines of customers,
in the pleading of their children and in the low, slow explanations
given to the children instead of what they want,
a rest and a relief in the phosphorescent pitch
of the nearly empty offices, the meter’s tick,
the blinker’s, the clock’s—that is,
will the silencing be brief, or will it stall
for longer than a spell of weather and become
a reality widespread, eternal, complete?
Might a chord, as it spreads in memory
as if upon the waters surfacing the earth
be for very long sustained? No matter how gorgeous.
Will we try to use our hands?
No longer care to speak?
