Aperto

What is clearest is beyond you most days.
Even in good weather the lucidity
of a blue sky is to a lucifer match
which strikes and then burns itself out
as the split-second bliss of choosing—of thinking
you've chosen—just the right musk melon
from the market is to its umbrellas rising and falling
with the routine of doggerel committed to the heart
when then forgets it daily, the heart which is to
the heart as the city of yes is to the suburbs of no
where nothing gets done. Summer afternoons,
rain rehearses its threat, its lot of hot air,
and clouds are rutted as a brain
turning the matter over and over
an endless field, a stretch of road.
                                              All over
the ancient city, facades and walls are under construction,
guazed with scrim—seen and see-through—a sketch
of what's beyond: building, fresco, scaffold
which you walk towards as if towards stone
cold certainty and shutters open to shutting.
Here, a hinge is a delicate thing: a thousand
daily cannons showing their smoke, fountains
gossiping of the same old water, wind shuffling
all the speeches that never mattered anyway
as the rain follows through on its threats,
through all of the apertures, all of your moons
clearly imperfect.
                                           Only the doorway
to the gelateria is open—it's late, you've been lost,
a woman in a white lab coat mops a clinically white floor.
You enter, you order, you learn
what can happen to plums.

It tastes like a revelation, but you don't see how
you got here, nor how you'll get back.

Copyright © 2005 Rebecca Hoogs All rights reserved
from Grenade
GreenTower Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission