The summer deck is filling with riotous rain pouring down from your hands,
I think. I’m terrible at these supernatural images and you wouldn’t like if I kept it up.
I know you are trying to water the plants, and the seedlings and all of everything
I might have neglected for the last three months while I’m here fucking it all up.
You let me sit in my nightgown all day while I type on the computer under heaps
of shitty books. You want me to move into something meaningful and I know you
are a function of whatever it is because you gave me all the departing desires,
as a way of teaching me to cope and to stay a poet when I don’t feel like being a poet.
Now the challenge is in how I put all this in me in the way you’ve always presented
me with possibilities, a kind of irreverence. What to do with the heart in rage. You
tend to those plants now—after I’ve killed them—and exactly in rain streaming:
a figurative blue that pools and floods damning everything but me with the uncivil
domesticity fighting to sound out all the activity no longer between us, unanswered
in time and space. I would tell you every day if I could that you are still exuberant;
meanwhile, there is still time in the day. I find that the sounds are louder now. I
don’t hear you talking to yourself in the hallways late in the evening as you used to
do. It was a robbed mumbling that echoed. Your drink, your vices, the privacy which
you spoke to a mute night. I noticed after you were gone that there was no more
aurality that started towards a finishing tension. A drone did drown in hollow floors,
in a sunburned house, in one now planted with proprietary neglect.