Where We Lay Down
published in Southern Poetry Review
We slept that summer on the second-story porch,
our cots within arm’s reach, and talked of school
or a trick played on Charlotte. Our voices dropped
as the watery half-light drew itself back out
through the cut-paper layerings of leaves.
When the chorus of trees began to whine and pitch,
the leaves singing the song of distances,
and someone took the sky and shook it out
with sparks like mother shook from white laundry,
the rain beat through the screen, and we leapt up,
scooting the cots to the center of the floor, jumped back
in the damp sheets, shivering though it was hot.
The next flash fixed us in a marble frieze.
Years later, waking in the receding tug of dream,
you’ll hear again the runoff falling from the eaves
in rivulets, drops, then slower, heavier drops,
and find the line of pock marks in the dirt,
and lift your head to see the slice of roof
against the sky’s blue invitation, which you
accepted, and know that Charlotte is dead
and so somehow still too young to join us
in the darkening air. Recall for me then what
I always meant to say before it began
when the leaves drop and turn at once in a hush:
if this storm will take me, I will give it my arms and rise up.
