Random thoughts on a grey afternoon.

 

Iowa City blues

Iowa city, 17^th Sept, 2011.

 

That river, once blue in your mind’s eye, is swirling mud green,

you can feel the squelch in your toes and

the vile teeth of creatures that mean you harm, even

if distant, even if voiceless.

The clouds are in gestation, their grey omnipotence harkens

whirling gusts of sorrow.

Please rain. Perhaps that will distract from

a small desert I have put through a sieve,

inside my gathered splintered spaces.

There was a promise once made to never write of nature, but

a midwest rakes a brow,

unending,

and there is an understanding of why they wrote of birds and flowers.

I would like to write of your shoulders and

other homes I have relinquished.

I would write of wars enclosing,

and even your words would be part of that assault.

But the clouds are pregnant with witness,

I share a landscape with no one but my sobriety, and on days like this,

the flushed rose of hips is alchemy, now blubber, where

beached whales of my perception of self are choking on a bed,

charting an ocean between us.

I promised to not write of the river, but

but water is reflective, and

it has not rained.