yesterday all rain was tilted at diamond-shaped angles to the street and i hid out in a rainy day bookstore with wet wood and old books with broken bindings and gesture-drawn portraits of old poets on the covers. oppen, olson, ferlinghetti. i drew a wet gesture, drawing of my face in the rain on a fogged up window i drew little red-ruffled, surrender, umbrellas collapsed in my eyes. little blue diamonds of displacement under. the staircases were damp, were old honey-colored in the back of a cupboard. i clomped various stacks of books up and down them that said things like "bird feeder's snow cap sliding off", or "a lurching frozen from a warm dream. Kiss me." or "cross of sponge and good will through the center of the eye", or "Favorite body of water: Arctic Ocean." i held them until i made them be quiet against my body. we each started to dry out a little, one by one. that took a while. the books were heavy and held my heart up.
today the clouds look like underexposed eggplants. today the clouds are ambling in like soft sleepy soldiers. today the clouds are making pockets to see through, today the city is a submarine and everybody's riding in it, underwater weighted down with our weird dreams and our broken things and our puddley streets and alleys and our hiding, and the clouds will make little round windows for us to see through to the surface of the sky, where the light is.
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