Summer in Exile

There is a sound
that’s as old as the oldest stream
rushing from the black forest
at the beginning of time.

A sound that wanders with you
when you drive across the country
with the top down.

When you wander
from one place to the next
as a drifter.

With no home except
for what echoes in your ears in the wind.

The drone of the tires on cement
and how the light flickers
through the trees of the roadsides in their haste.

Another town that speeds by in immobility.
Stopping when you decide to stop
lying on your back on a made motel room bed.

With the summer thick outside
and the crickets restless
in endless yellow fields extending out.

It is the sound of their restlessness
and the yellowness of the fields
painted on the walls of your dark mind.

The farmlands sprawled out absent mindedly in the heat
under the pale blue blankness of summer sky.

And the air conditioning pumps and the street noise
and the TV mumbling about the weather in the next room.

It is the sound of yourself in a foreign place
as a stranger to all landscapes
in all of their vague familiarity.

An anonymous walk through a dried up town,
an endless journey, the hum of the planet
and your body in a wilderness of street lamp.

This is the sound of summer, of the day itself,
of you in it.

Under The Overpass

The day has its own song
that drones inaudibly
in the background.

The mountains sleeping in their black forests
and the birds watching the valley
from undefined perches in the distance.

The drone of the suburbs below
sprawled out in their snake cul-de-sacs
with the people hidden in identical houses
doing undefined things
in our imaginations.

The sound of the small city
moving lazily under slow cloud drifts
always casting undefined shapes
over everything.

The day moves to its own music
—the sound of an animal sleeping
tossing in its own dream.

There is a silence
behind the noise of the mundane
that has its own sound
that can be heard
only once the silence is heard.

The sound of the planet turning through space.

A wildflower,
blooming under an overpass.

Grey on Grey

We try not to talk about the weather
but then it slips out.

Is there something being said, we wonder
as the huge clouds vanish the mountainsides
then move on.

As the arms of mist coil around dark trees
then rise to their disappearance.

All of these mysteries kept under the canopy
of simple phrases.

Brisk utterances of “It’s cold out.”
Sparse sentences about the likelihood of rain.

We move about the town with our umbrellas poised.
Cloud shadows following us through parking lots.
Mountains slipping into general mists.

The grey is coming and we head indoors
to watch it take over from behind windows.

As the spaces between clouds are covered up by more clouds
and the world outside drifts into a uniformity
of grey on grey.

We watch the outside with something warm
cupped in our hands and the steam
rising over our faces.

The trees swaying slightly from their parking lot holes.
The black umbrellas finally in bloom.

Plausibility of Downpour

Just when we think
we’ve finished with the rain.

Just when we think
the rain has finished with us.

We’ll look outside and the world
will be glistening.

Wet falling on wet
tires plunging
through roads turned to mirror.

Just as we’re about to believe it,
in the plausibility of sudden downpour,
that so much can cascade
unilluminated by our eyes
when we’re looking somewhere else
into the depths of our coffees
(dry becoming wet while we’re shrugging
in our memories),
it is gone.

The storm has rushed off
and we’re still sitting with ourselves.

It is gone, and we’ve been changed without permission.
The feeling of the day altered without consent.

As if some invisible hand had reached
inside of us and fiddled
with our knobs
on the prompting
of some unintelligible whimsy.

We’re suspicious
and it’s raining in our memories.

We carry around showers
even after the skies have cleared.

Birds of Paradise

She wore her hair uptight
when arranging her face
for the day
and all of the lookers.

She could be a sex pistol
if she wanted to
but said she wouldn’t stoop.

Without admitting to how slightly
she opened her blouse
so that her curvatures
led somewhere
in the imagination
like the curvatures of the Earth .

She went to church and crossed her heart
with head bowed
giving something back
that was heavy and unlocatable
to something light and unlocatable.

The days waned and then burst
into showers of petals
all different colors of petals.

The trees lining the avenues in white.
The yellow flowers on the dune banks playing
in the seaside breezes.
The birds of paradise
stiff and pointed in orange flight.
Frozen like her concept of heaven.

She is the bird,
the sermon of the season.

With no need to look
further than herself

or the flower.

The Drifts

It snowed here after seventeen years
of not snowing.

The lower hills and the upper mountains
appeared out of nowhere.

Strangely dressed
as if suddenly they went mad
or reached enlightenment.

We didn’t know what to think of it.

The different world that brought a strangeness to the seaside.
An inexplicable mood to our approach.

We might as well have seen
a three headed grizzly bear.

Or a giant trotting over the mountain peaks.

Or a serpent swallowing up a fleet of white sails.

For a moment we forgot ourselves
and were lost in the drifts.

For a moment.

Not a Hair More

We no longer try to capture
anything with our pens.

There is no description
that bring life to life.

We know this now.

Sure, it’s ok to write about the tides or the mud monsters
that people eat for hors d’oeuvres.

It’s ok to go on and on about seagulls in flight
or the curvatures of cliffs.

To scribble relentlessly over the angles of city streets
or the anonymity of cars
passing all day and all night.

As long as these things are what they are
in our words.

Lying on the page just as the flower blooms or the cat yawns.

Just as a field ignites in a storm
or the rain falls and keeps on falling.

Let our letters lie nakedly as they are,
and not a hair more.

The Weather Brings Us

It wasn’t long ago
when we were screaming in the night
about who said what
as the rain streaked.

It wasn’t long ago
when we were figments of ourselves,
no longer sure about the subject of our screams
—ghosts in the driveway,
a hillside crumbling…

Sometimes we have to yell and gesture largely
when the storms come.

Sometimes we have to let the clouds fall on us
and sink into the mud
—our hairdos dunked,
our mascara flowing with the dirt.

Let this be our primal therapy
to become the rain,
the hillside,
the mud.

A scream into the huddled trees.

Extending as the rooftops, the thumping leaves,
a thousand dark ravines gathering water…

We don’t know who orchestrated this great simultaneous sobbing into the trenches,
when the dim yards reach saturation and everything spills forth.

We don’t know why when the weather rolls up with a bruise
and splits open
so do we.