Because Again Last Night

the Sky Rained

 

 

I only want to write about the weather, while I read

about the brain. Turns out I’ve been getting testosterone

 

wrong. Also: hippocampus, amygdala. No surprise.

I’m still slipping my grip on the “pre-frontal”

 

of pre-frontal cortex. Remember those people

who would talk about pre-partying at Jackie’s or Nate’s,

 

even though the party itself was much the same

as the before and the after. But the weather sustains.

 

So, too, will a drawing of a neuron, its branching:

its roots, its limbs, all the tree-ness of it. The tree-ness!

 

I want to watch the storm come in. I want to watch

radar animations of a storm rolling across Kansas.

 

Underwhelming to confidently assert the temperature.

Morally suspect to acquire clothes for yesterday’s weather.

 

The cortex I’m finally understanding. Laziness—

that’s why I didn’t get it until now. I wish

 

I could have made something beautiful:

maybe a poem that absolutely “nails”

 

humidity and the feeling of the different levels

of humidity on a woman’s skin, or mine.

 

But my skin’s a mess right now—and there’s

a whole lot of reasons, it turns out,

 

why that’s flooding a hormone flood,

why that’s causing a coursing along a carved-out channel

 

from here to here to here—oh, if I knew more

I’d lose you. I’d lose you. I’d lose you.

 

That’s the way this poem usually ends: me losing you.

But there’s a new kind of sky, and my brain

 

has taught itself this feeling—this!—

and it’s making my face

 

do what my face is doing now.