Living on the Beaufort Scale

This morning’s bulletin hot with turmoil:
hurricane remnants curve an arc
just beyond us, leaving their consolation prize

of sweaty sheets and dew. We now wax
sticky and philosophical: what are hurricanes

composed of anyway, are they saturated
tropospheric moisture, overheated ocean swells,
or perhaps the force that maelstroms all into one

brute entity to barrel down the Caribbean,
the same conduit later sluicing muddy torrents
through a nightfall across northern Vermont?

Is the storm a thermodynamic game
of telephone tag, paying its chaos forward,

the way tyrannies surge, fade, reemerge across
histories? Or is it a deranged postal worker,
delivering remnants from there to here:

a shingle, a shred of hibiscus, an albatross feather,

a cry for deliverance? Listen, war dispatches
spiral across the Atlantic with increased frequency,

sparing homes and shorelines, thanks only
to our arbitrary draw of geography, leaving a sludge

too, but in our hearts. And if we’re lucky,
a pang of responsibility.