spring showers

before a summer storm, the air comes to the breath
like a wagnerian opera to the ear. dust falls in the stillness.
the weight of the ocean that dances leans its weight on
your sinuses. the gods play like little kids scuffling their feet
on the planet's crust, shocking their siblings and, tussling,
accidentally shattering a vase of souls in the living room
of good old mother earth

(oops)

but spring rain is different.

if you know where you stand with summer rain,
if you know to take the bad with the good as heat waves
ripple on the horizon like a bad drug across a weak mind,
and, from time to time, you nail boards across the windows and leave town,
well, spring showers require an entirely different philosophy.

tomorrow will be warm, and the leaves will lay their claim
to lushness before the sun can mock them with tumbleweeds
and locusts and mirages on the horizon. today has been cold.
outside it starts to rain, and ice crystals sting our eyes.
it might be spring. it might not. but that's spring.

under the featureless cloud layer, it might be anytime.
it might even be the night of a full moon. the wind gusts,
and we turn our faces aside, because
there are some things that should not be seen.
the walls grumble and the windowpanes get the jim-jams.
even gods run for shelter. we're not frightened or hurt--
only driven. we might be anywhere. we might be lost.
we certainly aren't here, not the way dings on the bumper are here,
not the way the smell of leaking radiator fluid is here.

what was built, what was born,
what was clever, what was planned,
what was killed, what destroyed itself,
what was an obfuscation of words covering an insignificant truth,
what named itself, what remains unnamed,
all the liars and one-eyed jacks,
all the rhymers and doubters and twins,
all the sharp things and the shit,
all the little gods with their glittering, ingenious secrets,
all of this is blown away by half-created sleet that will become,
paradoxically, life-giving,
until it's only we who remain, our inner selves just as quotidian
as our illusions, shivering at first with cold
and then with motion. the world is breaking.
what have we called for? what will come?

outside the rain falls.
the tree, under which all who have ever stood
still stand (in witness) and from which
gods may hang as fruit,
grows.

By De Knippling?