Last week, Larry Lee Palmer contributed what could be considered the first fantasy-themed poem on the Seattle Poetry Chain.

This week, he chooses the incredibly named Michael Rust:

Mike Rust is my choice to continue the poetry chain. Once upon a time we were both students of the sorely missed master John Logan. Rust—an immodest grocer and a talented fly fisherman—is author of a wise and oh-so-juicy short story [published in book form] called The Slug Feeds the Duck and That's a Piece of Luck (Ash Creek Press, 2006); Perhaps there's a larger personality around these parts but I'm still searching...

And here is Michael Rust's poem for the Poetry Chain:

Traffic Jam Facing a Lightning Storm

They pictured the sky to themselves as a great animated body...
who meant to tell themselves something by the hiss of his bolts
and the clap of his thunder

—-Giambattista Vico: The New Science

We are sure we will eventually come upon
the big wreck
the actual horror up ahead that is
the cause of this
and then get past and into the clear

but the horror is that there is no wreckage

no single
crisis but malaise
shared out amongst
ten thousand crawling cars

that this is daily what the citizens do

A rainsplatter mist mingled with
black diesel smoke and the burning
brakes of trucks

five stalled lanes are facing a thunderstorm

***

and at a speed for which nothing in the sight of man on this earth has prepared him
a single crooked white line splits the far sky down to the horizon

and the shimmering light holds
suggesting there's no mistake
then winks away
and in its place an exact after-image
dark
a fragile suspended ash

it is the same it is the shape but no longer a thing there
yet not quite not a thing

as the traffic is then suspended and fainter and so
not quite not a thing

and we are the memoir of lightning

until that vertical very
line suddenly fuses again and
lightning strobes the world and the road

***

a furious truck hisses beside me
it says the Pathfinder Trucking Company

but the earth stands its lightning against the cars

Thanks to Larry Lee Palmer and many thanks to Michael Rust. Next week, we'll see who he selects for the next poet on the Seattle Poetry Chain.