How odd. Blue skies, white clouds, hardly any gray,
the sun a flaming disc, and warm,
and yet big drops of rain are coming down.
cooling my head for the sun to dry it out,
and now two hours have gone by, it’s still sunny
and yet there’s thunder in bursts and rumbles
as evening’s breeze blows the clothes
I hung out to dry on the line: burgundy t-shirt,
navy t-shirt, boxer shorts, khaki trousers, socks.
Real things. Well, more or less. There it is again,
that ominous rumble like the sound
of the elevated train in your bedroom if you lived
on 125th Street and Broadway, where I am not.
I am in a hammock in Umbria, and I’ve decided
that every day I spend some time in the hammock
is a victory for the human race. Behind my clothes
there are grasses, green and yellow, fields
of wheat and corn, a diagonal line of cypresses
climbing the hill. It is, for the first and last time,
six thirty on the twenty-sixth of July, 2006.
I wonder whether it will rain.
NEWS