antecedent

I stand and stare, backlit on the front porch, shivering, watching the rain. It is all that I can manage, just to find that room to feel. The cold air, the hard rain, the gaps in the traffic, my patchy insistence on remembering. My arms clasped tight across my chest, my breath coiling gray and strange. The rain and my heart keeping poor time, you somehow always almost there, some habit of delirium the only calendar either of us keep for long. Cold fingers drizzled across the keyboard, this dialect that always finds me silent, wanting to sing.

I think of you near the open car window. I think of you in the color of the freeway going by. It rains, I shower, the sun rises or sets. You are in the margins and the liner notes. Each day each thing just trying to find you waiting in the wings. So far away no light can find you. So close that you are never really there.

The storm rolls in, all intensity and arrival. Another night of rain, another chill that will not warm away. These empty aches and painful blushes. Your claim upon my day a flag you dropped without even meaning. Your call through the weave of the wear of the day, your breathless distance as we near another ended night. I write this at this least last hour, another set of fingerprints left drifting about the world. The reason only telling because the rhyme got away.