Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

WILLIAM LOGAN
The Thunderstorm
The heat. The soiled heat. And then the night.
The painted bugs carved arches through the lights,
moths of the burning prairie, moths of the moon.
Who were we not to pay for our emotions?
That night our dull words echoed afterwards,
A cotton-wool deafness burned the inner ear
into Odyssey of vertigo,
the fire sirens wheedling out their song.
Love filtered through the summer's anesthesia.
The Greeks would have recognized our yellow heat,
the bruises of the mounting thunderheads.
A rough parenthesis. And then the rain—
the corrugated tin erupted like sin.
Slugs
The fallen pastures under slash pine raged
as still as revelation; and blindly came
the lumbering night slugs, their crippled process
beneath the waving horns of the landlord snail.
The houseless cannot but envy the housed.
Our north walls peeled in the sweet-gum's shadow.
I saw the palms fan upward to the sun,
life unto life, as if a soul would agree.
The garden strangled on the blackened husks;
the treefrogs trimmed their voices to oak.
Our tin roof, burning in the wartime forties,
lit up the blackened zones. The attic breathed
of heart pine over charred beam. The flare of a match
and even our harsher world would choke with ash.