The eleventh month
After the all the casting and the punditry
We return to our yards: manicured and plain,
Ignore the stray wrappers along our curb
Hope that the steady rain can sweep it up.
But it’s difficult to return to the ways of before
With this sad mist, this late rain without life.
Our great hopes have become trash in the drain;
No children parade in fanciful attire.
Our relationships never so needed repair.
The marital bed is dry and sleeps on one side.
A fictional exercise has failed, a reiteration
In the iteration of tricks and threats.
Who can fill the vacant lots of our desire?
That aspiration to devotion for fulfillment
In the primal sense, without commentary.
Blood, emotion like raw nerve, still craving
A quavering in throaty tones inconsiderate
Of the infinite consequence. The type that will
Require the children parading in fanciful attire
To dry beds, by green grass, asking to be fed.
Reserve
A strong woman started a fire in the rain.
I ran through the remnants of a hurricane
In a season of immeasurable drought.
There were sand dunes in the Mississippi and exposed wreckage
And since I couldn’t explore that river, once a hundred miles wide, I explored the thoughts in my
own head.
My trail crossed the dry ravines that had cut down
Guarding hills and once created a preserving swamp.
She was here and there,
Running down a side creek,
Smoking on her front porch
Not enclosed like the others.
She smiled and waved
Not like a beauty in a parade
But like she wanted me
Like we could satiate us,
At least till the rain passed
And our spouses returned.
I hadn’t known even that
Passing gratification,
Cheap by some standards
Expensive by others,
In years.
Early frost had killed the mosquitoes,
The bushes shed their protection,
I stood in the center of the swamp
Wondering
How long.