ACQUAINTING ETHEL

The professor’s fingers curled his stormcloud beard

into a single smooth cumulonimbus.

He was tired;

his blackboard was now a dalmatian of equations.

There were so many variables to account for:

the wind’s angle and velocity

the earth’s rotation on its axis

the humidity of the ocean air

And who can forget the goddamned moon, he mumbled in his mind.

His chalk click-clacked against the black,

hoping to answer some stumbling questions:

Where will Hurricane Ethel go?

What kind of baggage will she bring to east coast?

And what will she take away in the divorce?

He tossed his chalk to the lecture hall’s skyline

and marched toward his bookshelf.

His finger aimed across different tomes like a sniper’s scope,

Wind Velocity on the World’s Scale,

Unnamed Hurricanes from 1860 Onward,

How to Predict the Setting Sun.

Yes, he’s read these books,

and yes he’s made these predictions before.

He’s given plenty of lectures talking about

the shapes and tones of clouds

and the formation of rain, but,

with his graying brain,

his synapses are no longer striking as closely,

and like a child counting seconds between lightening strikes,

the electrical impulses drift further away each time.

Click-clack-click-click-scratch

his new bar of chalk rambled on the slate,

drawing long numbers and letters

spelling gobbledygook between parentheses.

He carried digits across the board, heavily,

and the weight of the white grew over time.

His eyebrows angled acutely,

his azure veins lifting his wrists upward.

He bit his lip.

I am a professor of climatology at Mississippi State University.

He stabbed against the black in a clear-eyed fervor,

some mist convinced itself his mental sightline,

forming vague certainties in his mind’s horizon.

After a flurry of screeches and with a resounding clonk,

a final hieroglyphic followed an equal sign:

Hurricane Ethel will enter Alabama in 44 days,

causing approximately five hundred casualties.

He breathed a sigh of relief,

and placed his hands on the monochrome mess,

smearing most of it into five-fingered fogs.

He lifted his tired legs,

one after the other,

and carried himself outside,

sitting on an old stone bench,

and one-by-one,

serenely counted the playful drops

preluding a late summer’s rain.

Six weeks later hurricane Ethel slipped through southeast Mississippi,

reportedly killing one man, a professor,

“indirectly.”