Ode 2: The Thunderstorm (1968)

by Brett Rutherford

We were alone, slum-student-
house apartment, windows agape
into a rainstorm,

hot summer viewed as multiples

through fly-eyed screens, each eye-spread
alike intoning solitude, pinpoints of night,
scattered and re-assembled.

Impossibilities abroad,
walk on the howling wind,

invisibly strut
between the streetlight cycles,
translate through mesh as spectral whirl,
their passing marked by sourceless rings
spun out on pools of rain.

Across the square,
someone else’s windows

spill out blackness,

a tumbling emptiness

where lights had been.
Have they gone to sleep
or do they reach for one
another over there, in

blundering lust? Does someone
over there moan, “Please!”
and the other cries, “Yes”?

Or does another solitude therein,
sigh and partake

of yearning night? For after all,
what is a storm but electrical
attraction gone mad? Most
creatures hide from a tempest,
and he who hides, trembles
alone in the dark.

Two in an arm-chair,

we lean and look

at the gaping empty
mouths of storefronts,
a neon flicker, failing,
from the Hotel Bar.

High-minded, we
ridicule the passions,

pretending my hand that touches your arm
is not and does not what it seems

but is a mere acting-out
of the diamond-spun

songs from a phonograph.

I share

the singer’s illusion, loss, and hope,
the stuff of blues and Broadway.
The songs are never true; they are
always and ever about the thing
you want, but cannot have.

I on the verge of dangerous descent,
gulp in a breath of cynic air,

but what I draw, what sifts
through the wind-tattered
screen, belies the song,
is love.

Later, I find you, already asleep
(or feigning sleep), the half-bed
moon-dark inviting me.

I hold you, warmed by your heat,
blessed by my storm-wrought hope,

while in the next room

two lovers sweat obliviously.
(They have abandoned themselves,
but neither you nor I can
surrender to this moment.)

So I, poised where our bodies touch
lay dreamless, feeling you breathe,
you, in wanting and terror, feel
my breath and pulse and wanting.

Dawn finds me at the lakeside bench
accusing the sun and sparrow flight

for ending my happiness.
You were still sleeping; perhaps
you only think you dreamt of me.

If only your dreaming self

could wed my waking madness!

 --Edinboro, PA, 1968, Revised February 2020