Jux

Early morning, pleated,
ink-stained clouds clumped together,
and blue-gray lapses in them spilling into an ocean
just at the horizon, transforming this worn Indiana plain,
a thousand miles from the Atlantic.

This place jerks awake for an instant,
made into a fishing town
on the edge, a sea,
its veins surging up and out,
and nets strike the air,
and raw salt williwaws stab.

She is a juxtaposer from time to time
when she kilters just right, when two temperatures collide,
when the jet stream bunches up like a feeding boa,
only

to

return

to

the stale of weary glass babeling towers
and park garages and shadowy stoplights
sprouting
from decayed gardens of bricks
and scored sidewalks
and steel-barred,
jail-cell drains.

No force,
only nerve;
no strength,
just a smothering lull;
Less ebb and flow
than stop and start
is a kind of senile tide,
impatient,
that brings in waves
of terminals,
thinned-skin, buzzing interfaces,
unquestioning blank cursors
on those reasonable human
all too human faces.