David A. Bart - poems
  • Intro
  • Home
  • Kingdom Come
  • Tunnel of Love
  • Exit Now
  • The Passion
  • Texas Education
  • Dumb Supper
  • Good Year
  • Toys
  • Saint Michael and the Devil
  • Invisible Knights
  • The Rain Gauge
  • Ponder
  • Remainder
  • Green Ghost
  • December 13th
  • Dedication
  • Prevailing Wind
  • Dreamland 1911
  • 10
  • On the Median
  • These Things Happen
  • White Water
  • The October People
  • Scene from a Moral Panic
  • Estrellita
  • Another Ending
  • What We're Dealing With
  • How Did the Foxes Die?
  • There was a Man
  • Bio. and credits
The Rain Gauge

The looming float of sheet metal
passed our second story window,
a detached garage that just cleared the phone lines.
A Volkswagen followed, cruising sideways
between the tops of power and light poles.
Our neighbors sat on the roof and cringed
at the deepening, doppler clap of a helicopter.
Their Pleasurecraft was still moored
to the driveway but the hot-tub surfaced
and departed. Someone’s cockatoo
climbed our TV antennae, and my son swears
he saw a giant minnow—something like
the black spin of an otter.

The river stayed for three days, then slid
back between it’s banks, leaving
a sequined gown and lawn chair hung
in the maple, a school of rotting fish
caught in chain-link fence.
Our house returned from the underworld
with upright coffee cups
brimming brown liquid.
And our hallway gallery--
the jack-o-lantern smiles of our 8x10
children—gone wrinkled and gray.



Illya's Honey, Fall / Winter 2010

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