vespers

We had our first spring storm this evening. It came suddenly like the vespers, like a worship service. The sky stayed dark from about noon until six when it finally cleared into a haze and then lightened. It reminded me a bit of last year, moving to the lake house a few days before the month of the most furious storms that Lake Erie had seen in the last few decades.

In a way I’m sad not to be there again this season, but only because I have a need for a water storm now and then, a certain fear that I could actually grasp a hold of when I saw the lake spitting over the breaker wall like a swarm of white bees. The whole thing makes me a little sentimental actually, and it got me thinking about poetry and photography: capsized tankers, shivering gulls, the smooth rocks on the beach after the high water settled, the things always left behind.