I scan the sky the way others study
a lover’s face. It is
all I have. Three nights ago when
I went out to urinate,
the smell of rain was so rich I couldn’t
get enough of it.
I turned my face to the invisible sky
& stood there taking
great deep breaths, drawing the strange
air into my nostrils,
& when I went back in my glasses were
so wet I had to grope
for a cloth — swatch of cotton softer
than any skin.
__________
Sorry for my relative absense around here; I’ve been busy with qarrtsiluni stuff.
Dave Bonta (bio) crowd-sources his problems by following his gut, which he shares with 100 trillion of his closest microbial friends — a close-knit, symbiotic community comprising several thousand species of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. In a similarly collaborative fashion, all of Dave’s writing is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. For attribution in printed material, his name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact him for permission to waive the “share alike” provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).
No words, only a held breath.
But a pretty amazing thing to have, all in all. And then the words to capture it, too.
Like Deb, I hardly know what to say about this very poignant poem – the second statement stops me dead in my urban, people-filled tracks, like some of Merton’s utterances out of his own solitude – and then you bring it all to such an equally-poignant conclusion, saying a great deal in very few words.
So lovely. A poem about facing the elements — both the outer weather and its coupled inner weather. Readers wonder: are the glasses wet from rain (outer weather), or from tears (inner weather)?
(P.S. I thought of the phrase “facing the elements” after reading DV’s most recent RWP poem.)
A love poem, and a very beautiful one too.
Thanks, all.