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Peaches
Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’
—Elizabeth Bishop
And? Some features demand it
abstract, like that pleonastic pronoun
speaking us back to God.
It rained. It spoke to me.
What is it when it rains?
It is abstract, but not arbitrary.
It sends up mushrooms, wheat,
potatoes, peaches, prairie grass,
history in the features of men’s faces.
For me, my brother strumming
his guitar, rain on windows.
It happened this way, it happened
to be the season, the dark sky, wind
which made the lawn a sea. I am
there but can’t describe the texture:
sweet music, ripe droplets like memory—
thousands of moments coming back
as one. Petrichor. It smelled
like morning. I’d give anything to be back,
for his music to recommend again
my childhood, except this: and it: all the climate
of myself as it comes just now:
Em baking peach cake, Goldie’s hindlegs stretched
on a sun-drenched couch pointing,
like a clock, toward now
what is good. And in its glory I sing, and
the veiled curtain lifting like cloud cover,
rain haze, and what it is and will be next— 