Weather Report

Cats are new to me is why I call them
lizards in hair suits. Every afternoon this week
at about three it has begun to rain, lightly, like
my mother used to rain over shirts and pants
as she ironed, rain from a Pepsi bottle with a nozzle
attached like a small shower head, at three o'clock
this smooth-crease rain, this white Oxford rain
turns the sun down and the house dark like the walls
are being painted the color of a cave for the arrival
of lightning. By five, the clouds are porridge
over the mountains and the cats are being chased
up and down the stairs by thunder, they have slit eyes
like lizards and their feet are the softest hammers
the wooden stairs have met, and though I moo and purr
like an outboard motor wrapped in cotton candy,
they are not comforted and I am useless except
that speaking another language makes me hungry.
It's reasonable to think the sky is trying to break
the earth and to run from this breaking and hide
in the open drawer of a dresser with socks which cannot
be broken, I would were I smaller like I was when I hid
in the boxes we moved so often to the same storm
in different cities. My paranoia is that the sky
is following me because every time I look up I notice
the ballet of clouds, and when the rain ends
about eight, I go outside and the cats
bring their career of licking themselves along,
the cumulus has broken into castles and pieces of brain
the size of the idea that we are not alone,
and if my chest is not fifteen miles wide as I breathe
the just washed horizon, it is fourteen miles wide.

Copyright © 2006 Bob Hicok All rights reserved
from Passages North
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission