To Keep A Thing From Leaving

All you can talk about is that storm from last night.
Blowing out every synonym you know
for strong and dark and wild,
you reenact its rage as if you, too,
were born of booms and whooshes.
 
Good work, baby, watching that rain all night
and naming those unseeable sounds for me
as I slept tight and curled and crooked, slept straight
through it, seems my eyes never open wide enough
to witness the ruin around me.
 
Instead of watching midnight loss, I found you
building paperweights in a factory in my dream.
How deceiving a mass wrapped in clear beauty can be,
weighted and wanting only touch, such
a perfect way to keep a thing from leaving, you say:

It’s always the wind that no one sees coming.
Last night so many trees and yards,
parked cars and plants and people blew away,
an entirely new town was made by morning,
just a few miles down the street.

Now you turn to face the window, lament
the soft ground and growing grass, shake your head
from inside and sigh at what the wind left behind.
Have you tried telling the grass to stop living,
that you don’t like how it moves for you?

Only the dead know words like still and forever,
I know tomorrow I’ll be better at waking up
quick and thin and ready to shape myself
into your missing thing, I’ll blow your sleeping arm
from atop my quiet chest and chase that
unseeable newness a few miles down the street.