I hear the rolling, amazed, agonized thunder

Monday wakes slowly to another beautiful sunny day here in the northwest corner of the U.S., with only a thin layer of overcast cloud-haze to shed. Like a lace cotton shawl over a bright blue gown, it is taken off and tossed over a chair back as Monday enters the room. When the Pacific Northwest
does do summer (and it is always a limited engagement), it does it perfectly. Temperatures in the low 20's (mid 70's, F), a light marine breeze to cool things off in the evening, and usually a light cloud ceiling to burn through first thing each morning.

Perfect weather for plants, too, as evidenced by the floral exclamations in our yard:


Very early this morning, though, was another matter altogether. I was woken about 3:00 AM to persistent distant (sounding) thunder. One roll crashing over another like steady surf on a rocky coastline. We don't normally get rolling thunder of that sort around here, and the night had been clear with no sign of coming storms, so I couldn't reconcile what I was hearing with normal and had to get up to see what was really happening.

It was thunder, alright. Regular flashes of what looked like sheet lightening back-lit the night sky, which was glowing a dusky orange even between the flashes. Aren't we supposed to count the seconds between the lightning flash and the thunder clap to estimate the distance of the storm? That didn't work last night because the flash always came immediately after the thunder rumbled.

It approaches from the sea, too small
For thunder and lightning
But ominous as a closed fist
And what it will bring

(Dick Allen, Cloud No Bigger Than A Man's Hand)

No, that's not quite right. This was more unbroken cloud cover than isolated (large or small) thunder clouds. There is a touch of Swift's humor in the unusual nature of this spate of nature noise:

Careful observers may foretell the hour
(By sure prognostics) when to dread a shower:
While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o’er
Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.

and...

Meanwhile the South, rising with dabbled wings,
A sable cloud athwart the welkin flings,
That swilled more liquor than it could contain,
And, like a drunkard, gives it up again.

A Description of a City Shower.

And yet, there was no shower (that I could discern looking out my window into the dark of early morning), so Swift isn't quite the right fit either.

Maybe the best fit is in the sense, less than the literal, evoked in the poem So It Goes, by W. S. Di Piero:

That marsh hawk,
its blown-leaf flight
across Tomales Bay fog,
summer’s abraded light,
the Pacific tide pressuring
and squeezing wave on wave
into the bay’s pinched inlet. . .
We feel somehow between us
still water crushed by that sea,
so constant it seems not to be.
The hawk, a circus, tumbles,
stops, stands upon the air,
beats its wings as if to shoo
the sun’s drenched veils,
and its clapping wings stop
our unstoppable argument,
that love goes, who knows why,
and delivers us from pain
to pain, air with teeth
that seems to eat more air.
Northern harrier, owl face,
they sea-changed your name,
who listens with your face
and shows not love but want,
speed, life in flight
toward, forever toward,
pausing at every chance
to use what ocean-born
bayside air sustains you
by resisting you. We thank
your sunken head bones
and wild close-to-water seeking
that somehow speaks to us,
delivers us
to another amazed
agonized place.

Amazed and agonized, indeed. At any rate, we had thunder, lightening, and an overcast glowing sky at 3:00 AM this morning, and now we have beautiful blue skies and a warming rising sun to look forward to.

Today's full playlist:
- Lyle Mays: The Imperative
- Fountains of Wayne: Hotel Majestic
- Phil Keaggy: The great escape
- David Gray: The One I Love

- Posted via Hermes.