If there’s thunder, plug your ears.

Putter around the house in something

loose and elastic, flashlight in hand.

A power outage should turn your focus

toward storm drains and generators, away

from the memory of one specific cheek- curve,

how it bloomed with palm prints the day he spoke

his mind and syllables piled up like wet leaves

by the side of the road, wind stitched into peaks

jagged as the mountain in all the Japanese wood-cuts.

You know the one. It takes the eye so long to climb,

it can’t look down again.