Thunderhead

“It’s storming in Chicago,” calls the mother to her son,
who already knows—he can see the thunderhead,
black and towering, gliding above the corn fields.
It’s miles away now, in Illinois, but his Hoosier blood
stirs with the approach of another Midwestern storm.

While she reflexively checks the radio
for tornado warnings, he runs between the cornstalks,
feeling the first teasing breezes on the outskirts
of the front. The field is empty otherwise; the cardinals
have already found shelter, as have the pasture deer.

She calls to him, but knows he is safe for now,
and remembers what it was like to run through corn fields,
letting the leaves slap against tanned arms and legs,
tasting the ozone tang of the distant lightning
and hearing, just barely, the tolling thunder.

He thinks of glaciers he’s seen in schoolbooks:
slow, inexorable (though he does not know that word),
and wonders if a glacier announces its coming, too,
the way the storm air weighs down an afternoon.
He samples the idea of a high-pressure chill.

But he does not appreciate the synesthesia,
and the nascent poem glides from consciousness,
so he can revel, unhindered, before the storm.
Years later, he will remember the thunderhead,
the cornfields, and over Chicago, the distant lightning.