Rain Poems, Hollow Poems

Rain Poem #1

Cilantro sticks to wet hands like feathers
Clinging as tenderly and tenaciously as
You cling to me, waking terribly from a dream

Rain Poem #2

Everything is wet, in this dreary season,
The sopping rain, the clogged city drains
The almost-September jaundice of leaves
Spread adhesively on felled timber.

We are waterlogged as shipwrecks.

Rain Poem #3

In your eyes on some days, waking, I
See mother-of-pearl visions, those thin promises
Calming city puddles
In a glacée of niceties before a
Wheelèd creature passing
Consumes and is consumed, entirely.

Aug. 31, 2006


Things that are hollow
include: forest logs
the sweet space between two shamshirs, meeting
the presidential profile of a bunny
49 cents of chocolate flavor, three weeks after Easter
and sometimes eggshells, two telltale holes, lighter than motes
of dry men returned to origin.

Things that are spectacular
include:
Things with spikes, jaws, claws,
and poison
things that dissolve the clogs in
drains and the stuffing inside
a woman, making her skin
grow thin and thinner
until air, light, and water may pass
through, unimpeded.

But what you are really waiting for is this:
Things that I have been avoiding.
You think I will say that I am hollow, now, too.

And perhaps that is true.
Perhaps there is a strange displacement, now,
where once there
was you.

But perhaps
It is also the case that this space is lined
with moss
with other dark, damp, cool things
Perhaps it is a space where small beetles
May thrive amidst the smell
of lovely rot all crumbling to soil.
You forget that there are things that grow
in hollows.

Now, hollow woman, lined with damp, sweet rot,
now, slow moss that hides all trace of what is broken,
Now tenderly
So tenderly
Spread you loose tendrils into the hollows of my body and
make a space for growing,
Where the smallest beetles and most tender worms
may nestle down, deep,
lie quiet and forgotten.

Aug. 2006