After Rain I

          on Maud Gatewood's After Rain, 1990

After rain twilight drips its ecstasy of greens, our night is still
not here, the great wet branches heavy with shine. It carries
the boat, that pain we rowed, before lifting oars to drift past
purple cattails, ribbiting at dusk. Together we might float
beside them, those throaty croakers, their one-note chorus
pulsing. A hand opens the window, this happens in old
movies, most babies turn out okay. Thrash and wail, most
old barns wabble in the gusts that frisk them, before towns
downriver get the thunder. When we examine Gatewood’s
feathered brushwork, it resembles the blurred hashmarks of
mating dragonflies, glimpsed mid-flight, upon waking in a
canoe. Before I was this, I was one of them, jeweled celadon
wings, inside the whir complete. After rain two brothers left
their horses on a ridge to enshrine the pond, its theater of
plops and splashes, jade and emerald waterlilies, endless
fronds on fronds. After rain, the disappointment of applause.
After rain, whatever hunted us dissolves.


After Rain II

After rain, tangled canopies shimmer like mountain moss,
dripping shivers in our ears. Summer landscapes are best for
dying in, thought the porch-bound colonel, saluting all the
ghosts he made the leaves. Silver eagle, silver trout, together
flew writhing until they shrank, a speck beyond the pond.
Toads droning once let me join their trance, as long as I bore
my throat, my lump, my sense of wrong. Gatewood weaves
a floating greenhouse in the air, her just-there branches
framing the boy Roethke, on tiptoe, his nose pressed to the
dirt. Black and turquoise, our pond wears the under-shine of
leaves in olive streaks, like government scarves a discharge
drowns back on the farm, one by one, the June his war ends.
After rain, trees turn tipsy sisters, humming at each other’s
hair, shards of silver seashells in their fingertips, combing.
After rain, the land rinsed free of boot-prints, we heave a
deeper year. After rain, our sky stays indigo, even though
our armistice is here.