Tornado
After I arrive home,
I fall on my bed in a swoon,
the ache in my head easing,
warmth radiating from under the hand
I lay on a heaving stomach.
I remember you saying to me:
‘I can hear you breathing,’
as if I had been lying on your lap like an infant.
I pretend it’s your hand,
not mine, that is touching me.
Then, as I turn over
in the heat of the afternoon,
delirious,
dribbling,
I think I see:
rain drill down
upon the full-leafed trees
in a thunderous,
perfectly vertical stream,
framed by the window
that I lie before.
Or is it a dream?
Later, when I’m awake and downstairs,
looking onto the road,
cars begin to turn round its corner,
one after another,
in an endless metallic stream.
It could still be a dream.
But something is wrong.
Outside, just yards from
where I had slept,
trees, felled by the tornado,
crowd the streets
with their amputated limbs,
and, also, their corpses.
People, suddenly out,
like me,
crowd the street too,
frantically smiling,
not knowing what to do:
A man acts as a policeman,
directing traffic.
A woman, out of her 4×4
angrily shifts some branches
as if they were protesting
against her right to drive such a car.
Through the jungle I see:
roofs, which had held out water for years,
now caved in, their tiles stripped off,
littering the streets in fragments
after being knife-edged playing cards
flicked viciously through the air,
I later heard on the news
I think of you leaving from where we’d met.
Is the roof of your car now caved in,
your head slumped on the steering wheel,
glass in your eyes and your hair,
blood trickling from your nose and your mouth?
Or, perhaps, you’ve been decapitated,
by one of those knife-edged playing cards
as you leapt out to avoid the weather,
I think after watching the news.
But now that we’ve said goodbye,
how can I ring,
knowing you won’t ring me?
I was trying to bury my loss
in sleep and dreaminess.
Instead I feel as exposed
as the houses all around,
that people gawp at,
glad they are not theirs.
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