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          The dog army-crawled under the bed, elbows and knees thunking the old oak floor as if to drown out the oncoming thunder we hadn't anticipated yet.   The boxspring, a squat roof, held her safely down in the lift-off of air as a low pressure system rolled in.  Her nose filled with ozone, sky somewhere already on fire.  Often she stays there for hours, licking clean the static from her fur, coming out when the weather has cleared, trauma forgotten, as if the universe has done her no wrong.

            But this one passed quick, before the sun had set, so I leaned from my chair to look out the window and there it was, eight years coming.  I’d seen it once before, here on fields so fantasy-green with young corn they look photo-shopped.  One end came from a hump in the ridge the glacier made, the other fell on someone’s summer home, so clear I thought the people inside, if they were there, would be all blue and red and yellow.  The rest of it arced up over the road, spanning three crop fields like some kind of extravagant irrigator that shows itself only after the watering’s done.  I stood in the road and because nobody else came out I claimed it as mine, the whole scene:  sun shooting straight across the yard, wide-set drops of rain still falling, and the entire crazy arch.  This was no half-rainbow, filling a gap between tree-covered mountains, which, on other days, I might have longed for to break up the sameness of this smoothed-over place.  This was something else, full-blown, which only this level land seemed built to hold.