Astonishment

In spring we are running at dusk, all five of us, away from a wisp of victim when a cloud barrels down out of the heavens, immense roll and wash, leviathan, barrels end over end, knocking us down in a field’s loneliness three furlongs from the house of my father— the full grain brushed with dew, the dew almost touching the soil, quick in its descent, sweeping towards a night between film and glaze— barrels in before Ammon sees the outline, like metal burnishing in the summer sun, and I sense that I’ve heard of something like this, argued with my father about thrones, dismissed him as he spoke of seraphim more beautiful than beryl, when Alma looks up too, and catches the horse speed of shadow and white—this chrysolite sheet as powerful as ten suns, dropped before us in a blind and boom of eclipse and thunder while we hold out for each other in this thrashing of sonic death, as though outside of this empty field nothing else existed, nothing that was clear enough to hallow after we fell again to earth, to dew that tried to make us clean, face first with the blast of angel and sky.