- 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.