A small rain down can rain but I am not outside, beside
an aluminum mouth of a gushing gutter, watching
the city sluiced in the casual event of falling water.
Nor am I standing in a shale of rubble, circled by dead
children’s toys, or crouched in a buckling raft, crusted
in cold salt and urine, chattel in a game of rockets
and gas. I breathe from two lungs, integral; my legs
warm under blankets’ nightly benediction. And love
lies sleeping, unharmed and unarmed beside me, arc
of her shoulder familiar as landscape to a painter whose
hands remember the curves of two cleaved hills, forelock
of treeline, the wild mane of sky. I trace hollow shadows
in a dark naming of parts as if my lover were a getaway
horse: throatlatch, barrel, and cannon; pastern, gaskin,
and hock. Tender, the names given to boats and beasts
of burden, what carries us from dock to ocean, trailhead
to highway, midnight to morning, censure to pleasure:
fugitives from dreams’ disasters. My beloved of nape,
buttock, and thigh; or stern, winch, and turnbuckle; or
dock, loin, and withers: in your body’s boat, I stow trust
for safe passage while distant wars make their incursions,
violence sends its newsworthy summons, and weather makes
a music of time. A small rain down can rain and by luck, Christ,
or zeitgeist, I cradle her in sleep’s long sail toward morning.
