Blowy Night

The sky is an ocean at night
and the bare trees like creaking rigging, clawing at the clouds,
ripping them to watery streamers. They dissipate
like spray, leaving just a lick of rain
that sprinkles down like salt.

Orion’s belt shivers in the gale,
the tossing Virginia creaper across the window screeches
a sea shanty and winterworn leaves
flutter down like feathers
or sycamore seeds, helicopters crashing
to the ground while

the moon swims lazily, an island
in the chaos, glimmering like a tear-filled eye
an orb of calm floating by
a million miles outside the blowy night,
the hundred billion heartbeats below
drumming at full cry.