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and here is now where they stand
with their fruit plates, meats, smiles,
other comforts and casseroles
while behind me and behind them
the world is a disheveled poem

yes here is where they stand
on the door I used to open
the hard matter of the walls
somewhere maybe in Alabama, Texas
carried in tune to the wind and rain

where, in some distance, someone points
and says there’s rain and wind coming
it’s like gray clay in a blender
see it up there
it smells of metal dust

no, a neighbor says, following
all the fingers raised, no, that’s
someone’s walls, bits and pieces of door
frame, windows in crystal grain
and we should run now or someone
down South or out East will make the same
mistake, call that laughing thing above the city
rain or hail but its not a metaphor
or any other sort of exotic figure of speech

it’s really stonehard wads of doll and corn hair,
fragments of mountain, fricasseed newspaper,
the atoms of love letters, and the reason
it’s so dark is because the paints of all those
Northern artists has been mixed
in is freighttrain music and movements
of air crowded with framing nails and hairclips
and buttons and someone’s teeth,
there a pen, there a crutch, there a spoon,
there a bag of peanuts,
there a bag of seeds,
car keys, paint cans,
someone else’s problems, unpaid bills,
bags of trash, senseless arrangements of plants,
coin rolls, trumpets, socks, gerbil cages
nothing about any of this is a metaphor
or trick of the light so no it’s not rain you see,
the neighbor says, who always wants to be right
and who at this moment probably is

he says, we should run now because
that’s not rain on the way, that purple stuff
we’re pointing at
it’s not a metaphor at all

and tomorrow here is where they’ll stand
with their fruit plates, meats, smiles,
other comforts and casseroles
while behind us and behind them
the world will be a disheveled poem