Rain
And a stray face spins me back
to the black-haired girl
I saw long ago and stood helpless
watching her pass, bareheaded in the
rain,
the easy way she found, wet but not
hunched
against it, hair damp and shining on her
brow,
her shoulders. I wanted to give something
for the dark rain of that hair,
the quiet of her face, not angry or
restless,
alert to each step, the crowded sidewalk
. . .
But what? Words? Dark rain. Wet face.
She never saw me. We’ve
tramped on down
our own dark tunnels now for years. What
hapless watcher
at my gates would know her face, would
let her in
without the password, find her a bed, say
rest,
sleep, I’ll be outside?
I know. It shouldn’t matter
who’s lovely in the rain and who
isn’t.
But it’s not beauty or nostalgia or
even lust
that’s got me, I don’t know
what it is,
justice maybe, prisons and churches, the
glowing creatures
at the center of the sun. Most days I
think
I’m almost free, I don’t miss a
single meeting,
I don’t hit squirrels with my bike.
Most days
it doesn’t rain, and nobody walks
the streets
in black hair, a light jacket and a glaze
of shining water, rain beading and
touching her
all over like the hand of someone very
large
and very gentle, very far away.
—Jeff Gundy
Rhapsody with Dark
Matter
What’s moving on the hills could be
mist or rain
the first long notes of the apocalypse
or just another load of thick
summer dreams.
What’s coming won’t be hurried
or put off.
Yes the stars are there,
blazing, and all
the dark matter too. A woman with son and
daughter
settles in beneath a bridge,
smooths cardboard
with a dirty hand. A man pours beer and
brags
of the tank he drove into the
desert. Two million bucks.
So much easier to blow things up than get
them right,
a marriage, a country, a small
town forty miles
from the nearest beer. It isn’t just
this poem
that’s loose, gliding from
scenery to disaster,
floating through the gorgeous, deadly
world.
It’s not just me. Say what
you will about the dark—
it won’t leave you contented, or
alone. It saunters
at its own pace down the long
bluff, up the streets
of the finest little town in Arkansas.
I’m trying
to remember where the keys are,
which road I’ll take
out of town. Remembering a voice:
I’m tired, yes.
The boys are fine. Call
Tuesday. Bring yourself home.
—Jeff Gundy, Bluffton,
Ohio, teaches at
Bluffton College and writes poems and
essays.
Both poems reprinted by
permission of author and publisher, all
rights reserved, from Rhapsody with
Dark Matter (Bottom Dog Press, 2000),
pp. 7, 26.
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