The Light Through the Rain
(after Wallace Stevens)

The trip in the rain has cost you your shoes,
sloshing through puddles and dreaming of Hartford,
watching the sky blear like noontime in Norway.

You think you smell ocean in the air; some
quality of wind, its shaking, recalls
beachy days of incessant pounding and pulse,

the tricolor sea, emerald, violet, and white,
alive in the manner of all remembering.
You used to see horses in sea-foam

or clouds. Spiral shells were souvenirs
of those days when the light shaded,
quickly and suddenly, yellow to purple

to the stage-light effect of the full moon
intoning its eminence in the wide sky.
You wonder what thing you have seen to rival

that spectacle: some moment of visible words,
floating hands, a mouth soft as twilight?
Those attitudes, fleeting poetic postures, never last.

Women do not hear enough from you.
You cannot tell them all the round smooth sleeps
they bring; they are gone before the river

of your mind can reach them. Some naked
cry in the air now drops you into the clear
wet knowledge of walking, each muscle

a heartbeat of pain, the whisk of your shoe-soles
rhythmic and worn. The ocean breeze is gone.
Ahead, an irised sun slowly breaks loose.

Cab Ride to Logan

Hours before I'm usually awake, I'm ready:
coffeed up, lipsticked and hairsprayed, corporate
face on, posture undaunted by the laptop slung
over my shoulder. The driver's not a talker, and nothing
gets past my throat, primed for meeting-speak. So I sit
in princessy silence, hands folded neatly in my lap.
Sun flashes on storefronts like an old, old promise:
even this cold sunrise whispers now of spring.
I like the silent ride, first smooth, then struggling —
gliding through Somerville, lurching down 93,
watching the illegal lane changes in the Callahan Tunnel.
I am clearly, irreparably urban. I suppose it's too late
for me and the natural world. Still, as the taxi noses
its expert way to Terminal C, I'd have to be blind
not to see the flock of small birds rising,
each one as moving, as lyrical in ascent
as a tiny, luminous plane taking off on schedule.