Just Before Culverden

Just before Culverden she is thinking that he doesn’t 
smell like love anymore, chews at the air like a tooth

aching dog, is driving hunched, too fast and sickening
with every new twist, each mindless enunciation about

‘getting there’, the car aimed resolute at the darkening 
hills like a nail and the rain begins to fall … What is she

saying? This is not rain, not falling—could swimming 
pools of water thrown down by infantile gods disguised 

as heavy, deep-chested clouds be described as rain?
And those bright angry tantrums bending the sky over

for a good old rollicking, a serious forking—lightning? 
They stop near the public loos, cowering heavy under

the niagara, the gashed atmosphere’s horror—rolling 
kilometres of slashed air caving in and … what the hell

are you doing? she screams, as he pulls a coat around 
him, wide-brimmed bowls hat jammed on, ridiculous

white, and, shouting above the slick clatter, he opens 
the door as if gods don’t matter: ‘We need to charge!’ 

Now that’s ironic she notes as his blurred form strobes 
about getting the cable in and she wonders if being

in a metal box, sat on forty thousand volts, umbilicalled
to a 50 kilowatt charger, attracts lightning the same way

she’d drawn trouble walking into any bar? And now you 
couldn’t pass a photon between flash and thunder, this 

space as tiny as that between oblivion and her terror; 
with anticipation worse than the frenzy outside, how will

this loss feel? And what did he mean, when joining
the storm, about it being great weather for a barbecue?

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Nigel Skjellerup lives and works in Ōtautahi Christchurch. He has been published before in various New Zealand literary journals.