Thunder

To please the children,
who probably know better anyway,
say it's the clouds
bumping against Mount Wow,
butting their noses fishlike
against a glass wall.

The young want to believe,
as you did once, in the figurative
nature of nature, its near-human
guise, its tendency to shout,
to crash against locked doors in a tantrum
and rampage among the peaks.

Say it's the brothers of cloud
who threaten to leap down the glazed face
of Index or Glacier, then slouch off,
still grumbling, toward Pasco.