By Linda Fay

Word Count: 253

Rating: G

Summary: A rainy day poem

Rain globes cling to a crystal cookie sheet
The lens that separates my world from me
The glass that needed cleaning yesterday
To smear three weeks of fingerprints away.

If you’d look a little harder
You could hardly help but see
The ossified nudity of your mind
Stretched out against the damp sky
Like a paraplegic, less than half alive
Evolving by degrees into a waxwork manikin.

And then
You wouldn’t still be sitting here, now would you?
But I am.

I am here like a splinter of driftwood
Carved carefully into a sailboat
And sent on a voyage.

Two miles downriver it wandered
Deep into a jungle of lotus
Forgot how to sail.

I am here like a hackberry leaf
Floated to earth prematurely
Made friends with the ants.

But winter-kissed breezes will find it
Buried in soil and snowflakes
Grown use to decay.

And now
You don’t remember what it could have been, do you?
It’s gone.

This window makes a mirror of your callow consciousness
Like some expensive volume, bound in red morocco
That should have been a Virgil or a Plato
If someone hadn’t stowed it in a cellar
A creamy flutter of empty pages
With some scribbled grocery lists.

Sullen sky watches while the water meets
The lens that replicates my world for me
The glass that trickles on the other side
Monotony of tears I never cried.

Come look at what you never were
And all the things you never did
You know, it’s dreary days like this
That make you want to live.