Prediction

Brilliant sun, headache, small afflictions. I want rain.

In the local speech, "they want rain" means "rain is

predicted." My arms ache, my body's heavy: I have

lost the habit of sunrise. I want you. You are predicted.

Your coming, your being, your existence. Who "you" are

is mystery, even to me. Life changes my life: the slow

games of the body, echo, undertone. I need another cup

of coffee, another night of sleep. My son emails he dreams

in Java, I dream in Yiddish; these languages are his future,

my past. My dream was of the worm that oozed into

my shoe as I dug up onion grass yesterday, crawled across

my bare toes. I can translate this, but the code of my son's

dreams is an enigma for which I'm grateful: reduced to

my understanding, his world would turn thin and poor.

What I read of his life is its thriving, bright flora and

fauna; what I dread, an undertow: still hidden, dark.

What we possess is lent for a moment, time's hard terms

stringent as a sentence. All I can do is inhabit what's here.

Brew the cup of coffee, throw the wilted flowers into

the compost, toss out the torn garden shoes – no more

holes in my coffin – deadhead and cut fresh flowers

before the rains come. You are the future who would

break and enter my life, the dream whose language

I haven't yet learned. I want and don't want you. I want

everything in my life to stay as it is, everything I love

to thrive, flourish, last. These "wants" predict nothing.

Eden

The morning's Eden, guano-stained, imperfect, rare.

The starling on the wire, erect and irritable, plaints

the same note over and over, then flies off to the mulberry,

still squawking. On the eastern horizon, stratus, haze:

the whole landscape gone lush, soft-edged, May's flush.

The green almost chartreuse, the gray mauve. A fat bee

culls nectar from stonecrop's rosy clusters. My life's eclipsed.

The hot sun moves into a cloud cave and here in my chair

I shiver as if my body were touched by snow, a bank of it

like the ice blue flowers frosting the field. I struggle nights,

mornings, to recover even a scrap of dream. To re-member,

construct its body. For Mother's Day, my child's father

buys me a clematis, something that grows and climbs and

clings forever, not a daughter, a son. Even loving is a glass

with dregs. I need to tell my widowed friend his wife's tree

is blooming: dusky pink, flaming. Each of us tenders

the other a moment like the dogwood opening: the first

offering of what reveals itself as rare blossom. Neither

receives this gift with grace. The sun's a balm, the air tonic.

Suddenly summer's possibilities: insects, thunder, days

of swollen heat. Under the stars you take the canoe out

on the pond, listen to peepers, tree frogs. The no of us

surfaces. Only our wishes have us whole and they are

bubbles blown out of the spit of self. Bursting they leave

their salts, their sluggish trail on the skin of all we touch.