John Burnside. Weather Report
[from Black Cat Bone, 2011]
A chill grey over our heads
at summer's end;
the road like a ditch
at Beley: aquaplane
and sidelights through the smirr
of afternoon;
yard brushes lost
in the mud
and carrion
hay on the fields,
where crows go
to pick at the drowned.
This is the weather, today,
and the weather to come;
the boys with their hands
to the glass, making perfect
phantoms of themselves
in their own steam,
or lodged in the doorframe,
they wave,
through the slantwise of rain,
already half-persuaded of a life
they never bargained for
and cannot alter.
