could cloud (two)

you could pull out everything you've ever saved -- your macrame owls, your peacock statuettes, your blow-up alien dolls, your thousands of pillows, your tapestries and blankets, and use them to throw a party. you could drive through a smoke-filled landscape, up into the mountains, and find ancient rocks that drip boiling hot water into muscle-softening pools in the earth. you could hang out with cowboys, work a corn patch, read books in a rocking chair on the porch of a unkempt building and smell the alfalfa growing in the fields. you could breathe the driest of airs, down in death valley, where the heat is so intense the boulders are bleached white and nothing lives except an eccentric 83 year old woman who runs what she calls her opera house, a space she painted and danced in for the past twenty years -- all by herself, at times danced for no one but herself. you could visit the graves of the unknown buried in the desert, mounds of dirt surrounded by rocks, little wooden crucifixes marking the head. you could freak out under the flash and neon of las vegas lights, a postmodern sublime wavering in the heat, the exorbitant cash flow ringing like a register from every corner. you could decide to move. you could fly to birmingham, quiet, dilapidated birmingham, check into an old hotel, listen to an old man stomp and howl with his orchestra under smoky amber lights. you could, with a crowd of downtrodden thitry-somethings, sing along to songs about the razor blade hidden under the candy surface of every day life. you could fetch a bottle of wine and a six pack of beer from a trading post on a dead end street, sit on the curb with your beloved and watch fireworks explode over the statue of a vulcan that sits at the highest point on the hill above the city, watch the kids run in the streets, and eavesdrop on conversations tipsy adults have about how long the owners of the building kept it in disrepair, and who would own it next.

sometimes a storm is what you need: this afternoon's clouded darkness, its rumble and boom, its downpour.