Friday, February 8, 2019

CLOSED BOOK

The story opens this way: my brain—a sleepy
old river town, inundated late last year
by weeks of cold

and sharp pointed rain—
which is still, to this day, flooded
with your memory.

The residents there have just had
to get used to the trench foot, the detours
and the closed stores

the bowed walls of yellow
tubular sandbags—the Sunday dinners
coming from tin cans.

All their backyard victory gardens
are, of course, still under there somewhere
and surely aren't ruined forever, but

nobody's holding their
breath at the moment, because—it's exhausting
enough just having to paddle

around everywhere in these makeshift vessels
on the opaque surface
of the way things were before.