Rain on a Barn South of Tawas

It may be as close as an old man in Michigan comes to the sound of the sea. Call it thunder if you want, but it’s not thunder, not at all. It’s more like the rush of semis on a freeway somewhere between Bay City and Flint, the road a son will take when he learns, sometime around the last taste of a strap, that the life he was born to is nothing at all like a life he’d ever bother to live. There’s an anger in it, a tin-edged constancy that has no rhythm, quite, something more like white noise that still won’t let you sleep. Think of some man, needing to get a crop in, but the fields are sop, so he’s trying to find something to fix, something to keep his hands working, something to weld, something to pound, something to wrap his calloused palms around that might do less damage than a lead-rope knotted and tossed over the limb of a tree. If you ever decide to lose your years by working this land, you might think again, about the barn you build, or roofing it with tin.