Rain and more rain. Crocuses poking through the black soil. The river splotched with contrails of thick fog. Redwing blackbirds trilling along farm fences, the American Bottom. It is February, it is spring. I’d feel easier if these portents were in March.
February, fecund, febrile. Forget me not.
The patrons at the songbird bar and grill. Hummingbird sightings to the south. Cloud chains like train cars lumbering along. One eccentric magnolia tree ready to bloom.
My name on the bottom of Carol Allen’s sneaker. She wrote my name, Eugene, in marker, she loved me. Keith Nesbitt and I followed creeks to their upstream origins, bumped into an electric wire strung across the water, zapped and falling.
The light. The sunlight through cloud light field light through cat’s eye light. Rain and more rain, ice storm tonight, they say.
And that field covered in cow parsnip, we were dumb enough to run across it, stinging barbs in the skin and shallow breath, the bright red rash on our legs, the terrible itching, the vomit, the falling.
Paul yells: Kiss her, goddammit: and she smashes her braces into my lips and she runs inside her house, and I am sixteen spring fire.
Rain and more rain rills the streams cold tea steeped in autumn leaves–
she loved me.
