Showing posts with label rain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rain. Show all posts

Monday, May 7, 2012

Rainy Season


There’s a sick part of you
that looks forward to it
every season, these weeks
of rain, their long romance,
their sodden caress, as if
you were a sad character
in an existential film, moving
through the vapors of a gray city
in your fedora, contemplating
some unrequited love, some
quiet angst.  You smoke,
haunt cafés, a Billie Holiday
soundtrack in your head,
and you sink in deeper
by the day, as it never stops.
It’s the danger of succumbing
that attracts you, of approaching
the edge and peering into that hole
you fought so hard to escape.
You watch it filling further
with each storm, a lovely bath
of depression, and you’re so tired,
wet, beaten; so susceptible.  But
that’s too easy, and you’re still,
after all, a fighter:  You clutch
at colors, waiting for the water
to end, for a return of sunrises.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Plum Rain

As the skies darken and spill, two students
fall in love in my English class, their eyes
flashing over verb conjugations.  Lightning

jabs the city, endless water sheeting windows,
cascading down, flooding streets; for weeks
the air a thick veil draping Asia, plump fruit

nodding in the mist.  Hands are busy
under the table—his wife, her husband,
their children, other lives, no secret.

They don’t care that I know, as I string
adjectives, comparatives, superlatives
on the board, back turned.  After an hour,

I watch them go, desperate for touch, for
their weekly appointment in a muggy motel,
where they’ll peel off damp clothes, join

their hot and delirious bodies to the relentless
drum of rain.  And what do I care, as I turn out
lights?  I walk home through another wet evening,

under dripping trees, the suspended plums shining
and ripe, close enough to pluck. A snarl of thunder
reminds me, this season will be over soon enough.