The Lightening And Us Poem by Matt Mullins

Parked in our driveway, home after
spending the evening with good friends
grilling food and drinking beer: I'm staring
through the windshield at our house lit up
against the dusk while thinking of you
and the life we've tried to build here
in this Midwestern town with its late summer
storms and green tornado skies no different
from those hovering over those places where
we both grew up. I get out of the car, walk
through the opening bars of the oncoming rain
the distant overtures of thunder following me
up our slick steps where I stand fishing
my pockets for the key to our front door.
Slotting key into lock, I glance through the near
window and there you are, illuminated
and dissolving behind the smearing pane of glass
dancing to accordion music and sipping red wine.
I push the door open and say...

What I say to you as I enter isn't really important.
What's important is the way I've keyed myself in
to this music, the soft light of our kitchen and the idea
that right now I can't imagine us being anywhere
but here. Earlier as I lounged around
our friend's deck during the gloaming, drinking
and watching the late summer sun set somewhere
behind the warm, flat shadow-less light
of photographers' dreams, it was easy to imagine
us somewhere else living other lives
just as it was easy to explain to everyone why
you couldn't make it over today. They know
you're working too much these days, trying to do
all you can to hold up your end of our house
which opens itself to the storms we take in
on the porch, watching those distant illuminations
of lightening throwing their yellow-white
flares up against the horizon as we wait
for the following thunder. But tonight we don't
open the sliding doors wide and carry our drinks
out to the old couch on the porch.
We keep to the kitchen, talking music
and I find myself thick-tongued and trying
too hard to make myself clear
just like the punk band I stopped to catch
tonight on my way home was trying too hard
to prove their anger authentic.

Later, a kind of music still plays in our bedroom
a drumbeat of thunder I listen to
as I examine without my eyeglasses
the blurs of light that x-ray the bones of trees
through the curtains, and I think of how good
it is to have you with me in the dark. Once
actually, more than once, things in our past
have broken for us. We've failed at love
cursed each other's very names, betrayed
and were betrayed and still we came back
to this embrace, the two of us eye to eye
a nose's inch apart, the covers that shroud
the possibilities of everything that can happen
from the neck down withering away now
to the ankles locking us together inside this storm.

When we talk about having a baby
I imagine it will happen just like this: a slow start
that becomes a grappling, fierce but tender, a storm
rising as we rise in strobes of lightening
to the drumming of rain ripping through the leaves.
all of it so clearly orchestrated for us alone until
I realize those romantic, distant thunders are anything
but romantic or distant to someone stunned
by an explosion of shock and fire at their ground zero.
This is what I am thinking as I breathe what could
become someone's name into you: in that instant
before we are made we hear a sound in the atmosphere.
It's a sound without words, one we forget as soon
as we are born. But I want to imagine it must be
something like the ozone charging ahead of itself
in intangible waves gathering everything
that conspires to cause lightening to strike
the same place twice.