Near Miss

When he went to see what sound it was,
there was no point of reference: it was Sunday,
and nobody dynamites for logging roads on Sunday.
The rumbling went on, and it went on, and oddly,
for each beat of wicked thunder had the shape
and color, as it were, of the one before. He stood on the steps
of the little house he'd made, in his little clearing,
bare-footed, in his stagged-off jeans and hickory shirt,
eggs burning on the new woodstove
just inside the door, past the new pitcher pump.
He shook his head, couldn't make it out,
stepped back inside from the bright May sun
to the cool and lovely shade of the cedar-clinkered room.
What was that, she asked, holding the baby close.
Don't know, and it don't make sense, was his reply;
not powder on the ridge, nor a big jet coming in
off the Pacific practicing for a war we'll never have,
and definitely not a storm. The man did his best
for what was left of her breakfast, wondering,
and then got on with life: the child had been
two days in being born, and the woman was tired out still.

A hundred and forty five miles directly north
a mountain had disappeared. The column of dull ash
rose many thousand feet, and shook itself
west and south and north a bit, showering stones
and lightnings, then rambled east. Beneath the cloud
a million old-growth trees, along with all those things
you find amid such trees -- ferns and moss, antlers,
frogs, the eyes of bears, and half a hundred human lives,
man, woman, child -- went out in a wink.

Call it a near miss, or what you will.