DAS Blog

The showery weather, even though it is June, has got me thinking about April and poems I meant to write about scenes from that month ...

Following a pre-Evening Thunder Shower

A uniform pall
of the lightest slate
is really a dazzling
tensor of chrome 53
once etched to salt
a rainbow
like the one emerging
from the recent storm
whose banging of flint
against the filigree
of the span over which
I now drive
started no fires

The only conflagration
is a slowly descending orb
which,
even a few days ago,
would have already succumbed
to a cold
winter's
night.

But it is April now (and Old 'Possum has allergies)
so her late afternoon showers
don't end in darkness
but rather in the long lilac light -- a Debussy nocturne or Rorem picture of morning --
of a spotless mind's looming star eternally on the verge
of setting

The Morning After

Steamy petrichor liberated from yesterday's rain
and broken sticks of orange from yesterday's pipe
waft through the windows
carried along by the pressure of the sun
which every day
floods the house
with gossamer silver dawn curtains
with monotonically increasing promptness

How soon will the sun wrap itself around us
like a boa
choking us out of our slumber?
How will we remember this first sign
of chartreuse
when the world is too verdant for us?

The faint powder left by the burning