Storm chronicle

Dear Dana and Blythe,

The storm jarred me awake at 4:00, at 4:30, at 5:00 — close strikes are a fact of life here on the mountaintop. The lightning came & went, came & went. When I finally got up, weariness flooded every muscle, & I sat on the porch sipping black coffee & enjoying the Brownian noise of rain on the roof. The darkness freed me from the labor of seeing, the downpour, from listening. Each flash & boom was painful, the apparition of trees, yard, porch all much too brief for my slow pupils to shrink and take in. Awakening is rarely a rapid thing; dawning can’t be rushed. I’ll admit, though, I pulled my pocket notebook out & began writing blind — too risky to go turn the computer on. When I looked at it later, in the light, I found I’d underestimated the spaces between lines: words overlapped as if on a palimpsest, ballpoint arabesques interwove like fingers in hair. Flashes, but not of insight, I appeared to have written. Ark of the Covenant — talking drums — dyslexia of dark & light. I am a cipher to myself. At least the storm passed.