a call from portland

You're in a car somewhere I called home,
sky wrapped around the windows, witnessing
swelling subdivisions, gas stations; the franchised,
highwayed loam turns red, then gold.

And then you come to rain. That cold mother
grows everything, even the asphalt gives way
to green. I miss her cold face, but also the way the
dull landscape brightens when the sun burns

the sky clean. You complain about the clouds casually,
as if I would agree, but I think of rain jealously.
I see evergreens under wet blurry skies, cafés, coffee
brewing, wide windows under awnings, dripping.

Here, above my eastern apartment, the clouds
themselves are ancient, the heavens august. A land
settled, its stone walls tired, its trees don't know me.
But here is where I wait for you, and wonder.

Return from my horizon, from the drizzle of memory.
Bring with you the slip-shod light of morning, the creak of
stairs, and a bed full of library books: my childhood under
the wet sky run down the eaves of my parent's home.