Wedding Night that Wasn’t, with Thunder
Wood-night, and wet stones look like eyes.
Lightning divides gaps in the trees.
There are twig-snaps, spats of fireflies.
They’re something else we couldn’t catch,
though I could imagine your looks, the jar
under our sink, its pale glow flashing drainpipes
while dim flies susurred glass-stop
to glass-stop; but surely, in this other life
we would have let the filament sour.
Rain: the forest-rustle turns drone: a sound
that goes with emptiness, deep and hollow.
Inside my tent is damp. A spider restrings
its web beneath rain-fly. I’ll watch it work
again, knowing its venom and quiet, knowing
it continues despite me, that I’ll clear a spun web
in the morning.
Let there be a warmth
into which we can crawl, a place in the mind
filled with light where we pile our clothes
at a bed’s-foot and linger at turned down
blankets, and there’s a silence to allow
infinite other lives to pass us by, and it is here—
it is the mind’s room and it is dry and certain and endless.
