Before and During Rainfall

Poem

a toast for house spaghetti dinner with a necktie, fresh overcoat, potted plant

my body and my clothes up in the street under five-minute fall falling rain

the news knocking, vegetables, and fruit, your phone calling me by name

tonight’s cars, a Volvo, a Trans Am, they’re an all-surrounding everywhere

asking for permission and I’m faithful, Israel, I’m parting my wet hair

I’m parting my wet hair, reaching backward, sailing forward I’ll sit down

and write it in a letter, to you the sweet, perspiring until there, on my face

you wearing shoes from amour and company a banister growing from below

your shoe pressed against my face I’m at your feet I like it at your feet

the monument to hold and hold in the hour a little after our designated time

our book is written with curious heads, to press the pen down and down,

so run up to me, actually pull me up, from the floor so it seems

you’re running up to me, running up to me, running time out of me

I’m wet all over and haven’t left your foyer, I am, ridiculous, you sublime