Where None of This Ever Happened and You Still Loved Me

Where raindrops,
heavy as every dog-legged and indiscriminate sin I’ve had the chance to enjoy
and cast out like disavowed children of shame from their brooding mother thunderclouds above,
turn clear-cut sugarcane rows into miniature rivers,
overflowing their troughs and swelling muddy ditches,
where muscle-bodied eels come to call for the crawfish below
and islands of ants defying death ride the currents through culverts along lonely gravel roads,
water colored forests where palmettos stand guard at the gate,
barbed wire fences and horses who stand miserable with their asses into the wind,
fat blackberries clinging to violent thorn bushes wrapped around the base of every utility pole,
stabbed into the loose top soil by the hands of men,
so that a warm kitchen window becomes the warning lighthouse beacon
distant in the downpour across soggy fields,
basin catcher to the tilted heavens,
deluge in every direction,
where I am left to watch the underbelly of a pocket-sized waterfall along my windshield,
each expelled lung erasing the scene outside the glass,
until I am and nothing else,
fog on the radio and the world soon submerged,
 torrid heat humid where the AC cannot offer help,
though it may cool my skin my heart is on fire,
if I but had you here I would bathe you again and baptize you with my long dead fingers,
until in mad revival we flew away from this place,
high above the anvil heads of summer thunderstorms,
where on your couch beneath the copper light of the lamp my hand found rest on your knee
and your head fell into my shoulder,
a thousand miles away from here,
where you still called my name,
where you still were mine.
5.3.2011