All Night the Rain

All night the rain wraps the house in a crinkle of silver.

All night the rain is a mother hiding presents inside parcels

lit by a single bulb on the basement ceiling / a slivered moon

hooked through the sodden heart of a cloud. All night

on the woman’s wall sleeps a print in greens and blues,

its lines and shapes shivering in the rhythmic rain. Atop

the mounds of her body, the purple patchwork is no longer

purple. Her body is no longer her body except for her hands,

lost on the bed’s shadowed landscape. The print is called

Reverberation. It echoes in the marrow of her missing bones.

Poem In Which the Poem Works Very Hard to Identify Itself

Some people write poems about their daughters. 
I write poems about my cats. This is not 
one of those poems. This is not one of those poems 

where the poet scribbles on the back of a health 
insurance envelope, never knowing this will be the poem 

that makes her—even as she is making the poem.
This could be one of those poems that, when read aloud, 
the poet thinks will make people laugh, but they never do. 

This could be a poem that breaks free from itself—
which is all the poet ever wants, anyway, for herself 

and for her poems—and runs like hell to another 
country, another century, another train of thought 
metallically slicing across the land, vagabond thoughts 

jumping off and rolling into dusty bushes while another 
dozen scrappy thoughts grab hold and swing 

their metaphorical feet up, up, onto the rushing train 
which may represent time or progress or some idea thereof, 
or just someone’s curious, meandering mind 

on a cloudy Tuesday in November. You can walk 
with a thought, or you can walk within a thought—

through a thought—around a thought—past a thought—
the prepositions waiting like train cars to pull you forward, 
within, toward, or about. As in, about now, the poet may realize 

the coffee is getting cold, the cat is scratching the new couch, 
and—oh, damn. This poem is about a cat, after all.