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- after Jehuda Amichai

The pain-people have returned
from their countryside—
metal, fog, gray, and cold.
They finger bare branches
and turn up in waking dreams.

 

The pain-people have come back
with words in their mouths
to ask me to join them.
A few months is not so bad,
they say, come home.

 

But the countryside—
how am I to survive
even a few bad months
within these barren grounds.
The weather is prison enough—

 

gun-metal sky, fog, cloud-gray place
not worth looking around in
for what’s gone cold and hard
as a dead star. Off color jokes
and gossip like slander.

 

The pain-people run raw fingers
across barren trees—Big-Leaf Maple,
Cherry the crows picked clean,
Dogwood with blood-red branches.
The say words that sound like vote.

 

Of all my waking dreams
this is the worst. I pace, holding
what I can of pleasure to my chest—
baby bucking in the throes of colic,
memory of the sun up high.