Post-Traumatic Rainstorm

Cinder blocks ripple. A hard lot is suddenly glammed up

by an illusion. Cats will slip under chain-link and lap this

dirty pool. I want to go there, be gone there, be anything

liquid or even topped with barbed tape. But the sky is swept

away and I am stuck in a parked car, all limbs attached

to the idea of being human. As if sketched by da Vinci.

As if stretched across a piece of parchment, I am drawn.

Fear circles flesh boxed in by so many tawdry corners:

disease, grocery lists, and suchnot. Even my thighs face

Vitruvian quandaries: whether to stay together or fall apart.

The mental ward is not unappealing: I check my calendar.

What’s a lesion in the temporal lobe except an opportunity

for time to fall into a black hole? These are clinical terms,

time and black hole, words even this century’s doctors

will recognize as problematic: both should help me forget

but don’t. Heal, deaden. Either way I am a woman who wants

to be rid of memory, past and future. Today I desire nothing

more than to sit stilled. What’s so rotten about this

willing suspension of all inclinations to engage anything

other than stasis, brow furrowed, body puddled, hollow?

Earlier, I watched a shiny black millipede on turned dirt

make progress that could be measured in inches. Perhaps

the art of letters is as insubstantial, as oddly disconcerting,

and as unwavering. Nothing can be mistaken for resolution,

yet the allure of metamorphosis, the way hard things buckle

under the line, ameliorates something, at least encourages

the generalized slurry of bad thinking to flow into the next

available trough. Slop has purpose. This much I know.