Her fever’s broken
but we can’t fall
back to sleep
as a noisy cell
of slashing rain
stalls above the house at 5 a.m.
It’s loud, she says,
and I, It’s wonderful.
I know,
she whispers.
We are both so in love,
in the reckless, proleptic
way of young parents,
with our three-year-old
who’s at a friend’s tonight.
(Asleep across town she can’t
hear what we hear in rain;
has little foreknowledge, no
clear-headed pain at dawn.
Yet old enough to choose this separation.)
What are you thinking? my wife asks
while the rain drums
a splashy nimbus on the house.
And because I am thinking them I say aloud
those lines of Verlaine
about the town and the rain and the baffled heart.
I hold her hand
in the lightening room,
she’s tired and her back aches
from lying so long in bed.