the sky over i-95 is violet, the color of the deepest bruise like the one you actually remember getting, that eclipsed all the little gray-green ones from tripping over belgian blocks, and mismeasuring the distance to the doorframe. the sky over i-95 cannot hold water very long and soon it doesn’t.
you look out the new-car window silent windshield wipers and you remember the other times it’s rained on your occasion (with stinging peroxide sometimes, and sometimes gasoline, when you had a match in the glovebox, but mostly water).
you never stopped liking the way the big trees swayed in the not-quite-hurricane or the deafening of the drops on the car’s aluminum backbone. you used to trust they’d never fall, they’d never flood the crashes you passed rubbernecking were never fatal traffic would always clear you’d never be late.
as you watch the oversized leaves support the waterweight today you think how every bit of that is gone from you now siphoned slowly and quietly but unmistakably gone from you now you think in matter-of-fact sentences because you are a grown-up: “I do not trust the trees. I do not trust the raindrops.”
quieter you think “I do not trust the future. I do not trust an empty building. I do not trust the movie theater. I do not trust the ocean, or the river. I do not trust water when I can’t see the bottom.”
you get a little philosophical as you get hungry and the exit numbers get high “I do not trust the highway. I do not trust me. I do not trust the curtains to keep me safe when I sleep, and I do not trust waking to bring me morning.”
you think in matter-of-fact sentences because you are a grown-up, but also because that’s how the thoughts come. there’s something that you do trust that’s enough to warm you as this unseasonable may comes to a close. you never stopped liking the way the big trees swayed and you think how they might fall but they haven’t yet. you think how it’s kind of okay not to trust them: you trust something else.
(pain is lucrative. so is smiling.)
a female cardinal perches outside the window of the room, just as you arrive to leave again and you think how she's just as pretty as the candy-apple-red male, though she's dark against the tree trunk
and when you’re back to celebrate the years since leaving you might even trust that tree trunk and the girlcardinal you have to squint to see
you might also trust morning, then, and night.
meantime, the sky lightens: sundrops while the rain comes loudly still.