farmhouse rain

 

it came quiet like

a drifter through our opened windows

it played the hair on my arms as i wrote

ran my skin and skipped over my freckles

trying not to trip

on its way up my shoulder

yelling my name like an old best friend

on a grade school playground

it had so much to tell me

before i knew it had arrived

the humidity broke
and i smelled it

it dried my tongue

and the spring on the screen door stretched

with that summer screen door spring stretch sound

and there

was a pretty girl, pointing at the sky

When I tell you this

you have to try to understand
how hard it is for me to leave

a glass of wine on a wooden table with a notebook,

with the burnt blue hues of night

settling down around me

but when she opened the screen door

and said, "it's storming,"

well,

our feet stepped together
from asphault we left it all
the farm house and the drive way

toward the woods we made our way

bounding

your mind might sense like mine

it is a certain life
that announces its coming

in the giddy pitch of summer rain

and at the edge of our yard

we looked up to find

the evergreens were saying grace amidst crisis in the atmosphere,

that thick skin suspended above earth

was reaching to grasp this forest and shake it awake.

in their reverence we caught the trees,

many hundreds abreast

lifting their prose to the changing wind

and pointing upward

urging us to notice as we pass

on these nights they shout with us

promising, just someday, they'd run too,

and

we are pulled under

by the current of it all

"it is storming," she cries

these were the same words

written lightly on our unconscious chests

the early day Artemis laid us down in her field, with a promise.

so I sprint the lawn

and yell to the hidden stars

drag my hand through wet grass

this, this is the darkness of a midwest ocean
I have swam since young manhood

"it is storming," she could hardly believe

as she called back to me

you'd think we were children of drought

our faces are the half grins of scandal

born in rain clouds that keep to the mountains most times,

an impetus conducted on the wind

that crawls your skin and lifts your chin to attention,

the moment that calls you to priesthood,

to run to the clearing past the far trees

and prepare communion

we have smiled at many august suns

knowing they burn in the innocence of duty

and would have you believe

its where their story ends

but we know better

we the denizens of tall-grass beds

that from our backs

see switch and milkweed

finger the wind for trace of thunderheads

wishing abduction was in their cards

come evening the rightness of day

gives way to the confliction of night

and our skies erupt

a little violence we love

already shirtless

and shedding the rest

i'll do what i can

to get closer

the road we run is a narrow enclosure

draped in a tall tree lean,

it tugs your pupils wide

before the open air of our field

this road is gravel and dust like only the kids of country know

and i don't know how to touch you

you've born a summer dress

through the heat

now speckled with the start of all this

and you don't realize it

but you've suspended your hands just above the tallest weeds

like you're telling the dirt

be patient

its coming

i promise

this is our movement
the hundred bars we like the best.