Her Dress the Color of Clouds

Robert Allen

November 29, 2021

Brother, it was Monday and I was on an errand to the store,

another second-in-the-same-day trip to the local grocer’s,

the November sun unseasonably warm but delightfully so

to me in my shorts-and-T-shirt workout garb, when I catch

a glimpse of this woman, running across the street, the wide

West Avenue street, from one strip center to the next, her

legs kicking up the skirt of her dress and her dress the color

of clouds in an approaching storm, like the paintings of

Narragansett Bay by Martin Johnson Heade which you saw

decades ago in that exhibit at the Amon Carter Museum

during those years when you were single again, ominously

dark with seething blue-greens, and lightning flashing like

the knees of the woman scampering before the oncoming

cars, and I remember not the alligator pear I bought nor the

two crowns of broccoli nor the round white container of

sour cream but the fleet image of that woman running, and

after bringing home the groceries I promptly put away and

forget them, but the woman’s image I keep alive because

you and I still look each time a skirt creates a thunderstorm.

Robert Allen is retired and lives with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and five cats. He has poems in di-vêrsé-city, Voices de la Luna, the Texas Poetry Calendar, the San Antonio Express-News, The Ocotillo Review, and Poetry on the Move. He now co-facilitates Gemini Ink’s Open Writer’s Lab.