Marianne Szlyk

After Rain

           

East Rockville sidewalks darken after rain.

Pine trees spring up after rain.

 

The sky remains puffy, almost bruised.

A woman walks her white dog after rain.

 

Birdsong rushes out to claim cleansed air.

The neighbors softly open windows after rain.

 

In an hour, these windows will shut again.

The pianist’s scales emerge after rain.

 

A man walks his tan dog past

cars gleaming like beetles after rain.

 

Across the street, from the upstairs window,

the horns gleam, and voices flow after rain.

 

Two women sit on the porch with the palm tree.

They chat and sip coffee in the last cool after rain.

 

The sun returns, lets fall a curtain of glare.

I walk through what comes next after rain.

 

 

Originally published in Literature Today.

 

We Leave the Desert

 

I sit, a dry leaf
curled up on a flat rock,
to watch water return.

It plashes down rock walls,
buoys last year’s leaves,
sparkles in sunlight.

If this were spring, we’d plunge in,
let our hair become seaweed
streaming between us,

but winter water shimmers,
reveals leafless branches
in liquid too cold to touch.

Above, the trees protect us
from January’s fierce sky.
We don’t know their names.

Touching their bark,
roots like gargoyles,
we cannot thank them.

You tell me this place is still desert,
these are not the trees we know,
lush in constant rain.

But water once covered this ground.
Even now the cliff atop the mountain
is streaked with ocean. The lives

that once lingered in warm waters
stain the bone-dry rock.

 

Originally recorded by Tales from the Trail.

 

 

If She Had Lived in the Basement

“Maybe you are searching among the branches for what only appears in the roots.”

n  Rumi

As she watches cedar branches
quiver in the wind, she thinks back
to the year she might have
spent beside a balky furnace
in her friend’s house.

She wonders if she would have been
stronger had she slept alone, had
she shopped and cooked alone, had she
sprung up for nettle tea and talk
with wiser friends.

She wonders if she would have asked
her parents for their blessing
before she went west.  Her father
gives it freely now.  Her mother
might have done so, too.

She might have known whom to trust, how
to act if she’d spent that seedtime
huddled next to the cold, brick wall
before springing out to blossom
in a new world.