vertebrae of atoms

Yellow clouds above the city of Berlin.
Blinded by green, we’d strolled fast at first.
We didn’t touch hands, and my eyes were breathy
behind a kind of resin. The light was dry.

We looked down, then sideways, and sometimes even
out towards the traffic sounds. The ground
was a wide mouth waiting for water. Storms
are always going to make a mess of things.

Close by, the men made of petrified music
stood back-to-back in a circle of four.
A dog chased a stick more swiftly than lightning.
A vertebrae of atoms wedded altitude to earth.

But still we didn’t see, and still the grass
was soft and heated from days of nearly.

When finally from weight, it dropped like bees,
carrying all their hopes in swollen thighs,
we were already standing, and running at exits,
the clouds polishing blackness back into the night.

You stamped in puddles and your thongs squeaked.
I watched the water-buds cascading the path.
It was rain like war, like traffic, like stealing.
It was gravity obeying those last two years.

With briefcase drowning, man abandons bike.
We raised our faces, watched the woven space.
Walking all the while, the buildings shining,
and my coat drank the bright of its redness away.

Reluctance whirred past wrapped in cars, and we
were no longer waiting and no longer afraid.
When skin takes on the silver of changing,
it makes no sense, people’s huddling in eaves.

Faces in the U-bahn. Briskly through.
Our hair like fireworks, like thunder in strands.
Everyone waiting, standing, smoking. A man
served Helga dinner from a brown paper bag.

At the supermarket we ran in, found marzipan
and bitter leaves. Only darkness of clothes
betrayed the weather we’d seen. At home the bath
made us faint from steam, two heads still raining.

We will sleep late tomorrow, in a surly bright
dreaming rivers of static and the deftness of white.