Tornado Warnings After Dinner With Your Family in Indiana

Wind suddenly pewter-dark jitters an American flag
on the porch across the street.  I think things 
are going in circles already, but your cousin 

says wind from the Northeast never brings twisters.  
At the cottage we’ve rented, you open the cellar door,
find a flashlight, turn on the TV.  The picture’s granulated, 

the weather map too small to read.  You shrug,  
say we’ll hear what comes if we turn off the AC, 
that you never had AC when you were a boy 

and didn’t feel the heat. You say children didn’t feel heat  
before air conditioning.  But I remember nights so thick 
that everything I saw was the discarded garment 

of a ghost: limp curtains,  sheets too damp to pull over me, 
even the hall light slinking under my bedroom door. 
I checked for nuclear war on a red transistor radio 

hidden under my pillow.  Even now, I don’t believe  
in simple midnight, in all that’s really outside: crickets 
reeling out song, wet grass that catches in my sandals.  

Hours later, blown awake by timpani and explosive rain,  
I have to read until dawn.  There may be no sorrow 
my watch will ward off,  but even practice in being spared 

does not make for faith.  You’re hard asleep, used to funnel clouds
that sliced the roof from your high school, second-floor floods.
You believe in exactly what comes tomorrow:

bright, harmless fog that clouds the windows 
as if something enormous had breathed upon them-- 
mercy that’s blind, and steady as time.