plummet

It’s not so much in the sky or in the forecast that keeps the rain on my mind. It is this shade of gray, a thickness to the atmosphere, the thirsty air waiting for the water to fall. Thinking back to the way the storm stitched itself into the fabric of the firmament, every thread a binding of heaven and earth, the way of matter wanting the lowest road known. The weighted gray of the blanket drawn up nearly over my head, the earth I’m made of electric in anticipation. The sparrows rush the seed strewn ground. 

The clouds have closed and the shadows gathered. There is a heaviness to the light, a thickness as the wind gnashes and the sky scrolls. The heat has given my fingers to the cold, holing up somewhere in the deeper regions of the organism, the breeze wicking smoke and sparks from my insistent flesh. The gravity seizes and the light hangs its hat, the rain in waiting existing only in swaths of probability and my self inflicted suspense. The cold keeps its declamations going, marching down into the marrow, singing from rainy afternoons out to the depths of space. I smoke and shift as age has its say.

I cough and I sputter, I choke and I don’t cover, spitting bricks on the edge of a heavy hit. A cargo plane rumbles aloft above the airbase, neighbors lofting gripes and gossip not too partial to social distance audible between songs, as the leaf and needle ripple with the busy wind and the rain doesn’t fall at all. I’m a lonesome contagion crackling in the atmosphere, another noisy vector competing the bandwidth the air allows. I shuffle through the scenes and sift through the pictures in my head that pass for words. Every flight a falling invoked, every sparrow a plummet unspoken. The rain still thinking what to say.