~RICHARD SCHIFFMAN~

AFTERMATH

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After the deluge, a week of shimmering heat.
But everywhere the mad broom of the rain
had left behind its mazy rivulets and fans,
the hieroglyphs that water scribes on land,
rills and rims and deltas veined like hands,
mud flats furled in runic scrolls, rutted paths
and newly tonsured roots, pine cone hummocks,
rafts of mortised needles, all that the countless
fingers of the rain had sorted out by size
and weight and grain, smoothing here,
eroding there, gouging, licking, biting, tousling--
as deft as any lover, and as rude, which I,
a paleontologist of rains, survey dispassionately
as old bones, a fossil world where giants roamed
and love has left its prints upon the sand.

   

© by Richard Schiffman