Sure Thing Blues

This appeared in Branches Quarterly

Sure Thing Blues

Doves come rushing overhead and gone: a mile away,
a load of cloud is coming, moving fast
and a piece of lightning jumps down out of it in green
and diamond with a purple edge, and a heavy breeze
comes rushing up, the young trees bend and flail
beneath the kind of wind that could make you transparent
if you could stay out there inside it long enough (blue
and heavy now myself: this load of trouble feels
too big for me: maybe I took someone else’s
by mistake again?) Darker now so that white toothpaste dog
that’s climbing wooden stairs to get a better look at the lightning
seems very white this minute but he isn’t really,
it’s just a case of those old semi-cerulean Sunday-twilight
Monday-coming blues: all the leaves are stirring now,
the singers are all territorial and clear, the dogs
forget what they were barking for and suddenly shut up,
a robin on a fat branch sits and stares at me as if to ask me
something but so? Black time is a sure thing now, so
come on rain. If you’re coming, come now.