Improv 2, Week 7

Astraphobia (selection)
Sandra Meeks

I play the recorded storm each day notched higher
for the dog thunder sends crashing through window blinds'

contrived calm, horizon strung again and again
against our view. Terror must be erased
by the distilled music of terror. The president say terror

twenty-nine times in his speech. Lines in the sand multiply
across the desert's wrist, the typical become beautiful
as electric light born in glass fist's crosshairs
at the flick of a switch--

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Trigger the sound of moist roots that stretch like teeth,
play the recording of this sound under a park bridge, to hear

the tone as the pulling of bark elongates like Jersey
taffy. The music will be bitter as if sucking on a tarnished penny,
but these instructions find agreement with the weather,

aligned with Almanac exactness. Roots extend every three
years, growing tall like the tooth of a good lie. Goodness
and badness are really just the same, it’s just which is preferable.
A bad root narrows instead of widening–-

emits a darker pitch that sticks to the teeth of animals
when licked, sometimes shocking them into tasting
other roots, not sweet but rather like a sour walnut
from last year’s harvest. Animals make room

for flavors of doubt, using the memories of a bad lick
as currency for next winter’s gather. Sometimes in the park
they can hear the orchestra of roots and wonder
what is more preferable: the sour rhythm of earth
shifting or the din it makes on the bridge’s steel beams?