Rain Chain

Posted by on Mar 3, 2014 in Poems | Comments Off on Rain Chain

By Madelon Bolling

I don’t know how to write frost melting
to drip gold, wink red, clear — pinging
the bronze cups chained under eaves,
enticing fall of cold-trapped water
from air to earth

because there never was frost
or bronze cups or eaves, let alone
air or earth but in these words
that freeze us to them until —

a bumblebee lands
right here on the page,
fuzzy amber on black legs, ticking,
ticking over these weed-scratches
that will yield no pollen

and we melt open in the hawk’s call,
the horse-snorting rooster-crow
singing tablesaw and echoing gunshot
several yards closer than far away.