Laughing

Trumpet vine bowers drape the catalpa in
emerald carcanets, lustrous and wet with
morning dew dripping on scuffed sandpaper
footprints in crushed pink stone. Look up!
Blue on green, jays flit and preen, laughing.

Mammatus

By Craig Lindsay (own work), via Wikimedia Commons

The multiplicity of succor within a storm, if you remember how to
tip your gaze up and back into the rain. Artemis Ephesus of clouds:
not the Untouched Huntress but the All-Mother, many-breasted,
pendulous, thirst-slaker. Those who study the surface things say
she was born in steep gradients in moisture, temperature, wind
shear across anvil cloud boundaries. An unfortunate reduction of
complexity, I think. Are they afraid to name her fecundity spanning
time, her bronze and marble idols, her uncanny gray-green skies?

Flash flooding

"Bodyboarders in Rio Vista Park, San Marcos River" by Charlie Llewellin.

The conditions are right for a leap. I’m saturated, can’t
absorb much more, and I’ve got no runneled karsts to
sluice the extra off into some aquifer. It doesn’t matter,
though. Rain keeps coming, sheeting down the caliche
under my skin, scouring fossils and calcite crystals bare:
lightning glimpses of my ancient, lime-white corruscations
as I'm tossed downstream, maytagged, pinned in the flood.

Elixir

How brackish those inland seas we carry within us, and how sweet
the salt memory of those tides. This is all I can do, now: fix myself
a cup of coffee, watch the honey-thread spin itself in as I stir, catch
it on the tip of my finger and lick it off. A taste of that mineral elixir,
and I recall how the berry stains set on your hands: sweat as mordant
fixing the juice, dyeing the memory, our skin damp as the inland sea.