Michael Lauchlan

After the Windstorm

I find myself chainsaw in hand
endeavoring to cut the present moment 
away from the past not

because it seems wise or even 
possible but because this task has always 
been coming–the growling machine

and the quick breath of storm that began 
with an insuck of heat over cornfields

a thousand miles to the west and the willow 
not waiting but rotting the wide 
white fungus and the opening bark

but also new suckers and fronds
reaching down down in the greenest shade
offering shape to each slightest breeze 

as partiers sway together and apart 
just before closing time at a campus bar

What can a split tree mean 
to a fox who scrounges here at night
or to children cycling past saying wait 

isn’t something somehow different 
Soon the hibiscus blooms will turn 
toward the east the open sky the sun

Thinking of Wormholes

and entanglement and spooky action at a distance, 
I’m sure I comprehend little of the world, 
the underpinnings of my life, and of all I claim 
to know. Even gravity remains a mystery, though 
I’ve had experience falling, once
from a ladder in a leaky bathroom, a reciprocating saw 
still reciprocating as, together, we dropped 
toward a ceramic conjunction. Gravity is convincing. 
I may grasp, but I don’t quite understand 
how the large mass of earth pulls on the small 
mass of me. I take it on faith and inhabit 
a realm of apprehending and being apprehended. 
A woman kissed me one night in the front room 
of an old house she rented, the lights of the bridge 
to Canada winking at us through her windows 
while a force in the spinning electrons of her lips 
tore open a cosmic clock so that forty years, 
replete with children, grandchildren, and jobs, could 
tumble by. So it seems. Particles of the past 
change each time we visit them.

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