Dear Tom Skilling

Dear Tom Skilling,

We none of us like to admit how much we rely on Doppler radar to get through our days.
Then it's gone and you realize you're an extension of your tools.
Someone told me you retired.
This is difficult to imagine.
I see you at your kitchen table, weather charts spread out over saucers and spoons.
Astrolabes and compasses, an isomometer someone at the station gave you as a novelty gift but which you are very seriously using to aid you with your home forecast.

I'm not saying you don't have a life outside meteorology, only that I don't know much else about you.
That your brother was one of the main Enron crooks is really none of my business any more than my neighbor's brother running the policy racket for the White House feels like something I should care about.
We can't choose who we're related to any more than we can control the weather.
Most of us anyway.
I bet you'd be a mostly benevolent weather god.
Kind and sympathetic to your subjects.
But then there's your love for chaotic storm systems.
Don't deny it; I saw you during the blizzard of 2011, in the Weather Center, spinning around on your stool.
I can understand the temptation to make tsunamis in the Great Lakes.
Maybe I share your desires.
Maybe I'm imagining things.

I sent a bunch of these to an esteemed litracha publication.
I never heard back.
Probably not everyone knows who you are or what your importance is.
A few years ago everything I wrote looked like this.
Some folks thought they were poems but I didn't think of them that way.
All in all in all it's just a matter of arrangement.
Here's a sentence.
Here's another sentence.
That they're on separate lines doesn't mean they're a poem.
But I'm having this problem in general of late.
Problems of definition.
Boundaries, categories.
No idea what a nation is anymore.
Haven't a clue about how to know if a person or a machine is intelligent, for example.
Desirous, I guess, of new vocabularies.
Nouns that acknowledge the fluidity of things.

A four year old comes in to tell me that thunder comes from rain.
Raindrops put rain in the sky, that's all.
The noise of the thunder comes from the rain, she says again.
Thunder is invisible.
What about lightning?
It's not invisible.
Are you supposed to be jumping around like that?
When we play the floor is lava we jump.
We do.