A City Waiting for the Rain to Pass

When sweet, adventurous Wanda came down from

Wherever it was she got to when she wasn’t home,

It was a day that looked like tonight

Where the sun bled into the watered down clouds and

The gas lamps bled sluggishly into the mist

And day bled seamlessly into starless twilight

And the people glowed softly, gently with a refracted gleam

And everything was heavy with the weight of a light summer rain

On a downtown cityscape

She turned to me with waxy Broadway lips and

Rouged cheeks no other girl in town has ever managed to pull off

Quite like our Wanda

She turned to me under the protection of the rotunda’s covered roof

In front of the train station, bustling and warm in the face of the torrent,

Waiting for the valet to bring her car around and watching

The throngs of youths mucking about in puddles and alcoves,

Dancing away from each other, trying all at once to stay dry while

Getting everyone else splashed up and wet

She turned to me with that smile she was so oft to give,

A left-ways quirk of her lips, drawn in and pinched

And somehow distressingly charming (her suitors used to say)

As if she knew some hard-won, rough-hewn secret.

She turned to me with that devastating smile

And said,

“It’s shrieking out,

It’s water down the back of my dress

shrieking out.

It’s gleefully squealing

And splashing through laughter

And dancing in the middle

of the street.

It’s singing out.

It’s camera flash in a darkened

museum out there.

It’s lightening up then crashing back

down out there.

It’s brave or foolish souls splashing up

some good times out there.

It’s rumbles growing ever more

distant out there.”

And she closed her eyes as if she felt the sounds of the city

With a visceral quality, curling and twining themselves into her

The chatter and shrieks and laughs and shouts to “Close the window, can’t you see the rain’s getting in?”

And when she opened her eyes she still had on that smile

Her face aglow from the gas lamps above us and

The new neons across the way that cast shadows sharper than her eye liner

Her eyes were some impossibly viridescent, buttery blue,

Studying me as much as I was her, searching for something.

They crinkled around the edges as her smile finally reached them

And though her stay was short and she left but a week later,

Off to steal spotlights and dodge cabs where I could not follow,

Her laughter seemed to follow me around every corner,

Winding around me like a ribbon sinking into my marrow

And I impotently wished for some clinging vestige of her

Left fluttering in her wake for me to treasure as my own.

As if I could hold fast to our Wanda

As if I could keep her feet still and her heart caged

As if her footsteps wouldn’t fade from the carpet in the halls Like tracks in spring soil during a particularly violent cloudburst