The Nature of American Weather
By Lisa Powell
My father lives pathetic fallacy. The rainfall's furious at him, each drop a spit of contempt and assault. He sees the pools in his basement as its seeping rage. The wind's always angry and bent sideways for vendetta, calling the tallest trees over his bedroom to creak and (he's sure) collapse. The sun isn't sunny, no smiles, just a menacing yellow-white eye of heat (the other solar cliche as oppression). And the humidity's the hot Ha! Ha! breath of hostility. Winters he lies awake at night in his worn recliner, waiting on white-outs and black ice and freezing rain, all blowing in bitter for nobody but him. He retells the same war stories, repeating names of hurricanes, like ex-wives who battered the doors, broke the window-glass attempting to get even only with him. Yet, he forgets when my sister and I, drenched in joy, danced in the road-turned-river during the last wave of Agnes, that bitch, in '72. Only a few years earlier we'd untied the yellow ribbon when the military shipped him out of the Mekong Delta. But he has never told us, not once about Tet, or given any specifics about his time later, working at the Pentagon tracking down (there's a thunder-pause in his throat now when he says) "terrorists". He's begun to instruct us on his death, to not tell anyone at his funeral what he did, where he worked or went in the war. But, by God, he's still a Patriot, loves his country and is proud of his service. It's all very complicated, like the weather – like how sometimes, you can be sitting inside your house in the suburbs and it pours down rain in the front yard, but out back it's dry and sunny. It's just a sunshower, but someone at sometime in the past experienced it and concluded the Devil must be so angry at the beautiful day, he’s beating his wife into tears. I guess it is all just a matter of perspective and one’s nature – like what that American cowboy-hat-wearing sports coach said about bad weather: “There’s no such thing…just soft people.”
Lisa Powell recently retired to Portugal after over 30 years in American higher education. She likes that the word for “retired” in Portuguese is “reformada” because it embodies the notion of “forming back again” as she’s finding her old self, a self who – after an MFA in the ‘90s – and before having children and working for survival – published poetry in places like The Birmingham Poetry Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and Red Rock Review.
