Barometric

Steel grey steamroller clouds overhead, my head
this morning in the clouds, watching
trees bend to the gale, burgeoning red
branch tips tossed and shaking
like tassels on a stripper’s tits.

The sky has fallen.
The ceiling so low I am Chicken Little:
not running, only standing awed that it stopped
inches above me. Thunderheads
continue their tumbling roll in depths
of metallic grey – I can say silver, now.

You said there was coldness to that colour
and predicted snow, but the thermometer
returned reality: 15 degrees. (What instruments we have...

Yesterday, rain drops pelted the car, fat
as your thumbprint in the small of my back, as wide
and wet as small fruit squashed underfoot, your moist eyes
glistening in the dark. The sound on the soft top foreign
to my ears, lacking the sharp ping and echo of metal,
like skin with its give and curves, the sudden drop of cheekbones.

The rain, brief, sudden, without much relief, lacked the fury I yearned.
Today morning clouds roll by. The wind whips last fall’s leaves into eddies
with garbage – flattened, sun-bleached, stiff, cracked cardboard and plastic ––
launches leftovers against cement curbs, the cement wall
of the rail overpass; concrete, tarmac, steel tracks, everything
blends into this awful sky.

I’m holding out for release: I crave violence, thunder, lightening,
deafening electricity – to be in it with you under cover of the porch awning,
your hand channelling this furious charge into mine, through my body to be grounded,
out my feet into those old wood boards. We will stand after the storm, full
and defeated. And as we walk back to our close bed, the boards
will bear the weight, and creak.