Some Feel Rain

Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle in its ghost-part when the bark slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there. When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air drop its motes to the patch-thick slopes of snow. Tiny blinkings of ice from the oak, a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy owl it carries. Some feel sunlight well up in blood-vessels below the skin and wish there had been less to lose. Knowing how it could have been, pale maples drowsing like a second sleep above our temperaments. Do I imagine there is any place so safe it can’t be snapped? Some feel the rivers shift, blue veins through soil, as if the smokestacks were a long dream of exhalation. The lynx lets its paws skim the ground in snow and showers. The wildflowers scatter in warm tints until the second they are plucked. You can wait to scrape the ankle-burrs, you can wait until Mercury the early star underdraws the night and its blackest districts. And wonder. Why others feel through coal-thick night that deeply colored garnet star. Why sparring and pins are all you have. Why the earth cannot make its way towards you.