Storm Warning

The journey of a thousand miles sometimes begins with you barking up the wrong tree

My friend, the Scottish writer Jim Murdoch, suggested the title for the poem Storm Warning. It seems entirely perfect coming just after Clouds.

There are a number of poems in Fourteen Threadless Needles that have their beginnings in a the soundtracks of the 1960s. Storm Warning had it’s beginning in Subterranean Homesick Blues and in the philosophy of Laozi.

Storm Warning

“Hi,” I said. It was 
a gray day we’d 
listened 
to an inanely overlong, 
decadently sober 
lecture on who the 
hell remembers what.

You said, “You know you 
don’t need a weatherman 
to know when you’re barking 
up the wrong tree.”