Articulating the Rain
Rain was pink last night,
fleeing sky with the celerity
of growth. Electricity finger-
painted the eve, blushing it
in nostalgia.
I remember rain like this -
rosebud children pressed
to panes, fingers flared
against autumn glass.
I too gave my breath
and prints to the Lakeland
lightening dance; clenching
my body like fists
for the paternal push
of thunder.
There were days when the rain
was grey. Days so chalked
with digestion, exhalation,
rudimentary drawings
of trees bent in storm,
that God was no longer
a man. He was a giant,
eyes so large
one could drown in the pasty
pupils. And I was nothing,
just a grown child
in a deluge of desire.
Sometimes, still, the rain is blue,
like something from a Joni Mitchell
muse. It forms rivers
through my window, dominating
all in fog, damp determination.
This rain has no passion,
no Crayola scars. It is drowsy,
drunken, and desperate.
Pink, though, is like a blush
of orgasm after storm.
It is innocent,
feminine, stillborn.
It is myself, and the bud
of my mouth, sewn shut
in the quiet resignation
of rain.
First Published in pith...
Remembering Wynd
The afternoons here
are like mornings - a girl passing
mentions Much like London.
I think of that picture of you,
standing so alone in Europe,
your thick chocolate hair
horizontal in the clouded breeze.
Stonehenge was colored
cerulean, so small compared to you.
You gave that picture to me the day
before I rode off into the flaming
north, my world prepared
and packed in cardboard castles.
And I wonder where you are today.
If you are still sitting on that ledge
by your purple window, fingering
the stars with wishes. Or painting
your face for more plays I've never
heard of, playing characters the cultured
would recognize. Certainly
you've given up your drive-thru diva
routine and are about rich enough
to buy yourself a silver car, destroy
that eggshell world, and follow me
north. Or maybe you're still
that ungainly fifth grade girl with glasses
you refuse to wear, sitting on the swing
reminding us that we're too old to be
here. We should be stars
with planes and men. I'll write,
you'll act, and we'll move into an old English
castle with stone walks and rose trellises.
Maybe you've cut that cinnamon hair
on a whim, as you did last March,
so I could run my fingers through it
but once, before skin. Maybe you're still
the same girl I left, going through life
as air through autumn limbs. But mostly
I hope you've become so large
that you've forgotten about me, and the swings,
and perhaps even Stonehenge. Because
you were too old for all that. And I,
well I am just becoming
too young.
First Published in Aubade
For Someone With Her Eyes Less Like Her Own
Sometimes I think that if you wore your hair just a bit shorter,
shorn against the ear, and slightly behind, if your clothes
weren't quite so anxious to showcase the mountain roads
of your body, I would have written ballads, books of poetry
proclaiming aching ardor. I would have mixed music, hoping
that all the reference wouldn't drown, wouldn't wash across
your white world as nothing more than Southern snow,
with its slim longevity, scant girth.
Instead there is the sound of your breath, its uneven accent,
underscoring the passionless Providence nights, when Zephyr
hurls himself against the windows and off again, when I flip
through fourteen channels, and find nothing to talk about in my
letters
home. I thumb through your promising verse, and all its attempts
to be a celestial abnormality, a subway to China. I restructure
your name,
rubber-cement it across the letterhead of my evening, the margin
of day.
I write in poor metaphor, in precarious catharsis, trying with
tsunamis
of desperation to pen the walls of your room, the curtains pulled
in passive angles, the pillowcases creased and off-balance.
Sometimes I think that if you spoke with more authority and listened
to less Cohen, read less Sexton, I could snake into the valley
of your shoulderblades, push your reluctant hair behind the warm
flesh
of your ear, and remind you that you are a constellation, a remarkable
piece of prose, if only to me.
