Rain, rain, go away

Falling In

Pain follows us like a lonely dog,
Drifting in and out of our conversations like a breeze.

It is always waiting around the corner,
Jumping out just when we thought we were free.

I want a resolution, a final note,
Not this continuous work of climbing out of one hole-

Just to fall into another.
But like a familiar pot hole in the road:

I always expect it and I never see it coming.

Somedays

Patricia Fargnoli

She is my new favorite author. I read her book, Duties of the Spirit, for my poetry class last semester, and I can't stop reading it. This one is beautiful:

The Undeniable Pressure of Existence

I saw the fox running by the side of the road
past the turned away brick faces of the condominiums
past the Citco gas station with its line of cars and trucks
and he ran, limping, gaunt, matted dull haired
past Jim's Pizza, past the Wash-O-Mat,
past the Thai Garden, his sides heaving like bellows
and he kept running to where the interstate
crossed the state road and he reached it and ran on
under the underpass and beyond it past the perfect
rows of split-levels, their identical driveways,
their brookless and forestless yards,
and from my moving car, I watched him,
helpless to do anything to help him, certain he was beyond
any aid, any desire to save him, and he ran loping on,
far out of his element, sick, panting, starving,
his eyes fixed on some point ahead of him, some fierce
invisible voice, some possible salvation
in all this hopelessness, that only he could see.

When Your Voice Is Too Loud

Words clamber over each other,
slithering out of the pen into
wretched lines of infestation
on a clean white page.

Light drips out the windows
and slides down brick walls into
puddles on the cement below,
weaving in and out
between hopelessly tall bars.

An airy stream of warmth
wraps this forgotten corner
like a thin coat, offering little protection
from dark, pervasive winter.

Flames embrace the crumpled pages,
which curl as if to hold themselves together
against the persistent fingers peeling them apart
into separate sheets of graying ash.
Words burn into silence.