an odd wind

[Jeremy Hight]

Mark looked up and could swear the trees were rustling in waves outside.  Three a.m      

The day had been warm and still.    The evening had been doldrums worn across the city.  Night had been still.  

He went to the window and sure enough it was a squall.  There were leaves flying against the window, beating against the way of June bugs before the stopped coming around,

the way  of hail against glass that last real storm in 2014.  

The thing is there was no storm, no weather prediction,  no spine to the moment at all but there it was.  

Then it ceased.   

Sometimes the quiet is the loudest sound.  

Mark had no wifi.  

The quiet roared as he tried to get back to sleep, it screeched nothing against the windows,  raged stillness over the city like a skin.  

He saw his family asleep and it was a comfort.  He felt his pillow a cloud, his sheets a cirrus in his hands and around him, the dark room a sky.  

Somewhere in the same neighborhood a life began , another ended,  another still seemed to have no sense, no purpose, 

Sometimes a breeze is an end, sometimes a beginning, sometimes just the confusion of papers against fences and leaves against trees, so it goes,

As mark fell slowly back to the atmosphere of sleep stillness wrapped his home in its invisible arms, quieted again.