Caoilinn Hughes

To the Elements

It is not the piebald impressionism of the afternoon window
bleeding greys into the hills and gay greens into the thickset heavens
but real rain that dissolves the halo of your hair to show your skull
for what is there. It doesn’t wash off sins no matter how you kneel to it.

We grovel to our yellow home, which is not a submarine but a fragile hollow
in the thick surrounding sea. How its carbon backbone doesn’t fracture
under the pressure is unconscionable. It holds us in its collapsible wings
through the mid-winter sundown which is even less forgiving than it sounds.

The rain pours petrol onto our cling film roof, then throws us—
boy and girl and bivouac to boot—into the fire of sunset to hear us erupt.
You sleep directly, grasping for tree branches in your evolutionary dreams.
I lie wakeful, waiting for the enormous harm, which we may or may not overcome.