Marc Pietrzykowski lives in Lockport, NY, and has published poems, stories, essays, and reviews in various places. His most recent book of poems, Following Ghosts Upriver, waspublished in early 2011 by Main Street Rag Publishing Company. You can visit Marc virtually at www.marcpski.com.

Two Poems (April 20, 2011. Issue 27.)

The Lattice

We drive at night, a long, flat highway, fog
making headlights on the other side
grow into sickly, yellow, two-eyed clouds
that swell and swell as they bear down on us
and then clip! Disappear into the void:
our own eyes adjust, there are things alive
in there, in the mist, then another car
approaches, light seeping into vapor
like blood in a bandage, like winter glass
and lamp wick, like a child learning to peek
through the threadbare patches of a blanket
and so make the world strange and dim, the better
to hide what was strange and dim already.
Over an underpass ahead flashes
an ambulance, a bleating rectangle
stampeding left-to-right across the horizon:
road bisects road, a lattice dropped on terra firma;
though we cannot find design, we build it,
and so ride through the fog in little spheres
of light. Down into a valley, the dark
thickens; to the left, galaxies implode,
to the right, the ambulance stops, a boy's body
lies bent on shards of windshield, a blanket
becomes a shroud, the ambulance lights
pulse like a quasar but more strange, more dim,
and all at once we emerge from the fog:
there in the moonlight are trees, and garbage,
and mailboxes; toothy, broken fence posts
and deer's eyes darting past, iridescent;
we emerge from the fog and think, ah, there,
I can see.

I can see everything now.

I Want To Hear The Rain Once More Before I Die

A rusty tin shed beside
a dry riverbed,
dry old knees under a gauzy blanket.
Barley tonight, barley tomorrow morning,
then perhaps that can of tomato soup saved
for a special occasion:
I want to hear the rain once more
before I die, thunder bullying
across the sky.
Even if some spills in through cracks in the ceiling
and molds my bones, I want to hear it,
just one more time,
one more spattering chorus,
and once more the stunned silence
after it stops, the sacred pause before
the greed and the suck of this planet,
my last home, resumes.