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Image:  Maelstrom, 12” x 12”, oil and cold wax on canvas

We are well into storm season now – not just politically, but weather-wise too.  Another big one is pummelling the west coast as I write – they are calling it a bomb cyclone.  I thought atmospheric river was a scary enough term for these massive storms, but now we have another level of warning to terrify us.  At any rate, with all this going on, I decided on Storm Warning, from my chapbook Level Crossing (Alfred Gustav Press) for this week’s Wednesday Poem.

Storm Warning


We ignored the signs all morning – that wreath

around the sun, then the fires the floods the freezing

extremes defying disbelief in a sky feathered

all morning with signs.  We ignored the wrath

of the fevered wind and the first percussion clouds

rolling in behind silhouettes of the dead trying with

opaque hands to feel their way home again, ignoring

the signs of mourning wrapped around the sun.

This poem is another triolet, that little eight-line poem in which line one is repeated as lines four and seven, and line two is repeated as line eight. It is one of a dozen I wrote over a two year period some fifteen years ago. Poet David Zierothpublished them in his delightful Alfred Gustav Press chapbook series, in which he asks authors to include a comment about their poems. Here are a couple of the observations I made there about the triolet:

“In the process [of writing the poems] I realized what I love about the triolet is how much freedom its tiny scaffolding supports, how far you can travel without fear of collapse. How it insists on precision, sharpens focus.”

and:

“You might say the triolet is shaped like a figure 8, the way its refrains start and finish the poem and create a kind of intersection in the middle. You might say our lives are a lot like that, too. This sequence … uses the form as a way of looking at our everyday lives, the implications of our actions in any given moment, the Möbius strip we ride daily.”