And that scrubby mesa
can’t afford this rain, but
she’d like to try it on anyway.
Hey, Cinderella, it’s about to be
—actually, summer in Arizona
and winter in Alaska are exactly the same.
It’s sort of like fascism and communism.
But May’s idealistic, still,
and birds rise up in defense, or in debate,
of a world in which the impossible
seems only barely so.
Let’s just say you had nothing.
It’s spring, it rains, you have nothing,
but you could have anything at all
for ten seconds. Do you want it?
Do you want that body? The sound of your name?
Would you like to slip into this rainy dress?
When it’s gone, you can always deserve it.
You can deserve anything you want
as you walk home, but now it’s time
to walk, by an empty, cracked road
washed over with sand, and a creosote smell
which is lush and endless
inside you, as long as you never breathe out,
and nothing will seem true
tomorrow, sweating at breakfast
and almost too hot to be lonely
but you are the night’s own antelope,
and you are a cactus covered with snow
and you are a moth in a city of evening primroses,
unfolded, bright, and offering
their most expensive stamens out to you,
because everything possible
is just barely so, in the world
there is much and vast beauty for rent.