This year, I decided to have the kids learn about hurricanes.

(I know, that's an unlikely choice in Ohio.)

I wanted to tie what we were doing in my class

to the regular science studies, and since they "shape and reshape

the earth," hurricanes were a viable curriculum link.

You can ask me anything now; I learned along with the kids.

Barometric pressure of a category four typhoon,

the string of named used in 2005, the year of Katrina,

the lay-out of the levees in New Orleans.

How to spell Ponchartrain. I know a lot.

And the thing that surprised me the most was the list

of conditions needed for a hurricane:

moist, hot water rising from the equator, and

light winds aloft, coming from the same direction.

I thought, I'd imagined, that hurricanes start in a furious way.

They don't, they are nudged into existence.

The woman I used to love is single again,

and all it took was one quick sight of her on my computer screen,

to begin the roil. Not something large, or speedy.

She rose up from the equator, the rubbed raw middle of me,

then one distant fact breathed on me from a westerly direction

and there it came: the tropical disturbance, the begin of the spin.

One day, flat clear water -- a clean mantle of happiness --

then, the next, something cyclonic. I wish I could see

the event from an outlying planet, or I wish I could

be a visitor on this planet, an alien star seed viewing

this treacherous twist with amazement and awe.

Look at the image now, the pure white of the clouds,

the distinct eye wall, the tailwinds spinning off the edges.

Something as massive as this is also rare and beautiful.

I know that, even as the surge wave is rolling toward me.

My friend chided another poet today because her poem

did not seem to revolve an idea that was dying to be written.

Something so powerful that it had to be spun onto paper.

And then, as our conversation turned to love, I asked my friend

if her love was one that she would die for, or die from without.

It was not. It is not. She could see herself being single

the rest of her life. Not me. The one love I had, the one

that whirled me 180 while I was in it, and then cast me

out into centripetal orbit when it was over, has shaped

and reshaped me. If I could look inside, at the skin of my heart,

I am sure that I would see the chamber marks a bullet

has when it is shot from the barrel. Though I will not

know what I once knew with the woman who tore me

through it, I would die for love again. I would lay my body

on the shore of the gulf, asking to be swept up and carried

until I am dropped into it, mangled and naked. I would stand

in the face of wide gathering cloud, my arms akimbo, shouting

let love kill me, before not having love leaves me dead.