Not the Only Winter

There is a generic sickness within these raindrops,

beneath the malice of deciduous trees. It’s early industry winter

and there is a late-model husband accounting for being fired

again, how he stands there, landlocked to someone else’s front yard,

arms bent like obscene pagan tools, leaves gathering

in massive incongruities at his feet. An anesthesia

is building in the grasses all around. He knows this to see it.

Norway rats wield across-the-streetness, a blueprint

for survival locked in hairs on their head, itineraries always unfulfilled.

He is unprotected, out here, weighted down by a word.

In the memory of it there is a night and the poverty in his head dangles,

the wind is an Eastern lesson in exhaustion, a reminder

of how the nighttime is the closest anything gets to primitive anymore.

In the memory, he reaches for his wallet and gets a fist full of feathers

from the Cooper’s hawk that spent weeks on the barbed fence

off Pat Bay. And then the thought occurs to him,

that’s at least how long you must wait for a true failure.

Only then things could turn. But even if they didn’t.