what happened after the storm?

the living room windows are breathing in sunlight
and you will be coming,
like horses thundering down the valley,
with feathers of summer rain on your skin
you are shivering with life.
the trees on your street were steely and skeletal
their power dormant but doubtless
like you. come with me to river's edge;
see the perfect movement over rocks?
see the endless source?
feel the warm brown mud between your toes.
hear yourself: "this is, indeed, comfort."
it is the lock and the key
it is the threshold and the leap
it is time.

Day In, Day Out

I skim sun off the tops of buildings at 6 a.m.
to stick it in my jeans' fifth pocket on the right hip
where we used to keep soda tabs, when we were kids,
for luck. So while they fashion new and terrible instruments
to help deaden the pain and excise capital from the afflicted
I try not to listen, pretending my filing cabinets are benign,
running a forefinger over the smooth distinction and clarity
that's pressed to my denim hip, a reminder that the tedium
will wash over me in rolling waves of paper and platitudes,
and if the grinding surf finally bowls me over
and I am scattered on the rocks for seagulls
I still have the sun.

Turning

We sure try, but we're running out of metaphors for becoming winter.
Jack says it is watching yourself fall from a great height,
but Susan is so sure that sometime in November
we all start skating along a mobius strip of ice.
Kristin reminds us that it's also a giant spruce tree
holding us in its branches like so many drifts of snow.
But here in the north, the crystal lattice of Decembers
only remind me of my father with snow in his mustache,
the way his breath hung before him,
and how he told us that the importance is in the icicles,
their perfectly singular descents
like the cold fragile distance of our lives.