Rocks

The rocks individuated as people
if you register people
as individuals, which I do,
haplessly, helplessly, when forced,
fright or flight or love or _______.

The plants need water.
The rhododendrons are drooping.
Your lust for the contemporary
is understandable but mildly disappointing.

She made me a latte,
today’s small gift.
They must be annoyed, the ones
living now next to a construction site.

Lorca had a lover in New Hampshire.
Perhaps McKay did too.
Mpox cases explode,
fade … O homophobia.

And now of a sudden: rain
when I’d just told her it would hold off.
I am unreliable,
once again proven unreliable.

The weather app is no oracle.
Knowledge of, knowledge that:
it is raining.

*

It will have rained
by the time you read this.
There are infinite plausible sentences
by which I mean grammatical
only as long as this clause.

It was a summer of cardinals.
Crows bickered on lawns
across the Northeast.
Granite outlasts us.

If you bite into the beach rose’s fruit
you’ll find it tart and refreshing,
a smaller, firmed up, aerated tomato,
all skin crunch, some seed, no juice.

The rhododendrons are listless.
Today’s pathetic fallacy,
empiricism … whatever –
they want rain. Watering.