On October Rains
by Adam Judah Krasnoff
My eyes fell, the rain opened—
the first mistake was considering the poem a door
to something else. I sat beside myself, a river,
a blue door—the idea was to wait
for a beginning, an attendant sparrow, a phone call
from my father or oblivion. The object—
an eyelash, a poem, an open, laughing rain.
It’s easy enough to laugh, a blue pen,
a father, one room & then the next. It’s easy
for an afternoon to write, the city says.
I thought the exit from uncertainty was a door,
a word, the voice of a river on a rainy afternoon.
I believed in rain, its lingering, &, in certain
moments, you. We don’t remember anything—
weather, winter, whether we laughed. I did,
thinking of a poem about memory &
an extinct genre of feeling. It was raining
on the right pair of lips in October, the month
we remember light is a preciousness finite.
Meaning—you—isn’t hard. It’s rain fleeting
over your face in that just-right kind of light,
memory. The rain opened a door, you entered,
my father called to explain silence & his best
matzo-balls. Someday I’ll have a word for life,
I don’t think. Someplace, on a riverbank,
a poem is thinking of me, & you, & soup—
& laughing at the man whose job it is to be sure
time passes when no one is watching.