[but the rain is full of ghosts tonight]
       

and it has taken something from me,
driven my feet from the earth,
tendered a gift that displaces me. The water
pours through where-I-was like a lesson
no one will tell me—a breaking
up by filling. Each droplet glints like the eyes
I have consented to and then let go of.

Because even your deepest stare could not stitch
me to the landscape. This rain, and its interminable
music, at once initiates loss and turns from it.
I try to gather its signatures, but they come undone
like parachutes without bodies. How can I step
through this gauzy curtain toward you? What in
the world is so adamant about division? Cars
continue to butt their way through delicacy, leave
tiaras of smoke in the falling.

Love, do not turn blindly from evidence—there
it is—time as obvious oblivion . . . and repair.
Time touchable, drinkable, blitzed. The mangy
cat huddles itself under the cold engine
and the awnings are full of compliance. Now
is the era of standing apart from it because
the wetness makes us suffer too close to eternity.
Can you feel the terrific weight of its accumulated
utterances? Still, it feels so buoyant in my hand—
the umbilical (or elevator shaft) of heaven yielding
to spare—O innumerable pollinated yeses

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Copyright © 2013 dawn lonsinger All rights reserved
from Whelm
Lost Horse Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission