from
ANOTHER LONG (56.) Patricia Ranzoni
He brings her a new supply of
ink she opens
when she can to tell her friends
no matter how long
it’s been she’s thinking of
them, as ever, wondering
how they are doing and if it’s
this fierce where they are.
A full bottle fits this rain.
Power’s out. Cussed roof
leaking in four places. Towels
and pans everywhere
but not in time to save the
mid-section of one poor shelf
damn it. Quick
wet metronome and a little pee down
the wall behind the marble stand.
She rescues
the vitrine with C’s Rochebonne,
thank
God, J’s
annual paper sculpture, A’s
gold calligraphy,
the W’s crotcheted snowflake,
so many pretty ones
and hugs and kisses and spies
the beading on the foil
of Bailey’s yellow construction
just in time
you’d have thought she’d’ve
put holiday hellos away
by now but she still needs them
where she can see them.
Eyeing her dip her pen,
Johnny (three
already), pleads “I need
some blood
to write with too.”
Sighs So do I
oh so do I.
Windgrowls and pants so loud
you’d swear bears
are hellbent on breaking in
as though October again.
Every few minutes a thousand
seeds get spit at
the windows and rivery eaves.
She’ll have to build a fire
if it cools down much more she
warms herself
with stored faces voices her
flannel her quilt.
Bears on the house! They’ve
found a crack and are
clawing at it and a gush of
water’s going to pound down
any second she knows it is!
And the drizzle she caught
before it could soak the books
she’d given her father,
come back to her moved to tears,
pulses like a scared
rabbit’s or Johnny’s arteries
being a dinosaur.
Another place an I.V.
drip. Wind sucks back into
itself to crash more like whitewater
than air. Bears
outside the kitchen shed!
Bears on the porch!
If you don’t hear from me
again she writes search
for me thrown against the
hedgerow with the banking
blown off and shingles ripped
free and the foolish
bantams still trying to fly.
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