The Forecast
I carry myself out into the rainswept blur.
I lift my pleasant voice over the coming flood.
I have nothing to do that I’m going to do.
I keep meaning to purchase a dog. I keep waiting
to email you back. When I see you again will
I know who you are? Once I wove you a mask
of rattan and hair. Once I carved you a mask
of painted wood. I brushed my wooden leg
against your wooden leg. We had learned to imitate
each other’s breath. When I see you again will
you know who I am? Will you place your words back
into my open mouth? Once I held you for years
in the stones of my eyes. You were an ineluctable act of God.
Into the drainage ditch we hurled our toys.
Copyright © 2013 by Michael Dumanis. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on April 2, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
"My first memory—I must have been two years old, at most—dropping a toy pail from my baby carriage into a deep cement drainage ditch and watching my grandmother walk frantically around the ditch, not knowing how to get the pail out. The masks in question hang in the Menil Collection in Houston as part of a group of objects once owned by Surrealist painters."
Michael Dumanis
Michael Dumanis
Michael Dumanis is the author of Creature (Four Way Books, 2023) and My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. He is the coeditor, with Cate Marvin, of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006)
Dumanis teaches at Bennington College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.