The Weather
My husband’s granddad chronicled the hail: gumballs,
golf balls. A storm has thinned the orchard, he wrote,
and blown strange birds to Yankton. Dry spell, he wrote,
cool spell. You can see how it was, brevity and magic
always afoot. Here and there, a break in the weather:
Horse foaled, he wrote. Plow broke. Soup at Gerald,
won rummy. After her dad died, my husband’s mother
read every word. One looked like Glad. It was Cloud.
Meteorology
Its bread and butter is weather
as botany’s is lawncare
and philosophy’s sneering.
There is not much margin,
after all, in pure reason or lichen,
in the trajectories of rocks
that immolate before
they have a chance to strike
a man. So much for meteors
and the mesosphere. Down here,
no one is lobbying to see
shooting stars top the panes
of ten-day forecasts, floating
above the canonical icons: clouds
that dangle dreamcatcher
snowflakes; maned suns; a thick
fog, triple decker sines. We like
our meteorology as is, nearsighted,
issuing only the old warnings,
each a reassurance that whatever
is falling, it is not the sky.
From the author: I wrote these poems more than a year apart, but the submission call from Couplet sent me back looking for poems that were siblings–and there they were, both of them playing between the optimism and pessimism we project onto the weather.
Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, and, one other lucky time, Couplet. Her first book of poems is forthcoming with Orison in fall 2025.
