POEM OF THE DAY

Tasted, smelled, rising from hot asphalt, sweet rain
in the street where a man works on his camper in the rain.

Like desire, felt less often now we are old, the joint pain
and fatigue competing with that other. Sweet rain

rising, lifting the dampened piano that hides its teeth
beneath a lid. Sweet rain, bird song, all the rain-wet

exigencies a house brings to bear. Valence, curtain,
scrubbed porcelain. Perhaps a mouse-brown rain,

pummeling the decking. Or a violet sky shines behind
cloud cover, dense with time. Where shall I go, rain,

how can I recall my only name? The man's sweat
pays for no one's poverty. Often I feel jealous, sweet rain,

of brother and sister — gone to Sweden, or France.
That's the end of the story that began with a father's rain-sweet

face, poor past, Holocaust. Let the locusts swarm, sweet rain
brings them down out of the dogwood, they die by sweet rain.