Classic Poem

I've been partitioning my minutes
with a modest butter knife, balancing checkbooks
and poems, calculating panic on a dry, white page.

I've been measuring emotion like a bony chef
holding, with one hand, the bottle of oil,
and with the other, a shaking quarter cup.

What meter is oh dear ? Same as release , and I am
both: the tidy housewife's hand on her mouth,
the laughing kookaburra in the dark saloon. I prefer

the latter: I've stood under rain gutters until
saturation's end point, when a cotton shirt can get
no further soaked. In that state, one can't dine

downtown. Suck the pits from all the purple dates
in the house, crunch pickles and pour the dregs
of red wine into a tumbler. But I haven't done this,

not lately. Last night I ate a bite of bread
and stared into the doughy yellow clouds.
What moon was it? A sliver? A slice? A whole circle?

In bed I counted, not sheep, but the pulse
of my furrowed brow, and went
under like a body before the suture.

Thunder ruptured thunder: I woke to
windows laughing light in all right angles,
mocking my lover's and my every soft sleeping curve.

The world filled with rain. The blackness roiled.
Our bedroom teetered on the edge of the ages.
There was no space

that a storm will give between lightning, thunder,
no comma of calm when you catch your breath.
Then the thunder beckoned itself

back — a temper stubborn but nearly spent — and
I dreamt of a very shallow pool
and making love within it.

I woke to gray blue and a single finch.
The morning shook its leaves. The bedroom
felt changed by water

but then, why did we wake dry? Some storm .
I slid out of the cream sheets and cringed at how
the high thread count felt so damn polite

against my legs. Tell me about it . And so I did.