prose sketch: front porch in the rain

Wed 5 Dec 2012 ca. 1:45 p.m. my front porch

A cold day, with the pattering of rain. A feeling of shrinking into oneself, a craving for inertia, to wait it out. Let the somber cold grayness pass like the loud cars groaning up the street one after another. The rumbling acceleration of each one. The yellow stars of the sweet-gum leaves are no longer fresh on the road where they were blown in the night: they lie flat and faded, pasted to the wet asphalt as though pressed below a sheet of waxed paper. On the boulevard and behind the town houses opposite, the trees are all bare: nude and branched as dark coral, skeletal arms upraised to the ink-stained sky. No light on in any neighbor’s place: all is domestic darkness, a winter-daytime vacancy. People are in their cars, surging forward with determination and noise.

But the raindrops fall: like being in a cold tent looking out on a wet forbidding world.