How does weather affect place?

Lightning by Mary Oliver

The oaks shone
gaunt gold
on the lip
of the storm before
the wind rose,
the shapeless mouth
opened and began
its five-hour howl;
the lights
went out fast, branches
sidled over
the pitch of the roof, bounced
into the year
that grew black
within minutes, except
for the lightening - the landscape
bulging forth like a quick
lesson in creating, then
thudding away. Inside,
as always,
it was hard to tell
fear from excitement:
how sensual
the lightning’s
poured stroke! and still,
what a fire and a risk!
As always the body
wants to hide,
wants to flow toward it - strives
to balance while
fear shouts,
excitement shouts, back
and forth - each
bolt a burning river
tearing like escape through the dark
field of the other.

The Weather Shifts by Arthur Sze

Unemployed, I recollect setting a plumb
line for the doorjambs to a house,
recollect nailing a rebar through two corbels
locked in a 60˚ angle into a post; and
smell unpicked cherries, fragrant,
in the dark rich earth. It is a pellucid
night in January: and the mind has its
own shifts in weather: a feel for light
from a star, or for a woman’s voice,
a recognition of the world’s greed,
of a death march on the Philippines, or
of being shot by an arrow dipped in curare.
Drinking tequila, I watch the moon
rise slowly over the black hills; a bird
sings, somewhere, out in the junipers.


Assignment:
1) Read a chapter in Leaning into the Wind: A Memoir of Midwest Weather by Susan Allen Toth. Choose whichever chapter seems interesting to you.

2) Write a reflection/connection response to all three pieces—free write, Leaning into the Wind chapter, and poem of choice—from today looking at what you observe, what you question, and what you interpret about place. How do these help shape your concept of place? Post to blog.