Why Poetry: A Partial Autobiography ["It's about to rain, suddenly..."]

It’s about to rain, suddenly and without mercy. The rain will be brief, I can tell. but I will be driven inside within earshot of those anxious sounds bent on occluding my mind like a pile of unpaid bills —perhaps I will even see the pile of bills. The rain will be brief, but no matter—I won’t get back outside tonight. ~ So, I have maybe ten minutes for this to get said before all is wet and after the fact ~ because I have only a succession of chances, most missed. ~ Cal is finally fast asleep; the machine that makes the mist that keeps his trach moist rattles like an idling truck. Simone is plotting something, standing and yelling in her crib, jumping now, her sleep a bad joke. Ten years since last I was alone. My mind is not my own. ~ Reading the new poems tonight of my old teacher —she was never taken with me, not particularly—I admire her lifelong pursuit of childhood through art. She has pursued art as though it is as serious as childhood, which we all pursue to the end. ~ And yet, if her poems—ornate as stained glass leaning against a wall in the glass shop, windows looking in on almost nothing—say anything, it is,I am alone; beauty is everything except company, so beauty is nothing, almost. ~ Does she want what I have? Do I? My poems lie. The rain is coming. A few drops more and I’ll lose these letters. Simone still won’t sleep.