by Peach Delphine

Relentless sky burnishing us
into shade, thicket comforts heart, 
Gulf the promise of tongue, hammock 
an elevation we sing from, 
nave of cypress and fern.

Roof knows intimacy of rain
percolated off the sea, returning 
to us, dripping from brittle cabbage palms,
settling in sand, seeping through limestone, 
eroding our bones, dissolving  memory.

Rain is a liberator, together
we return to the flowing,
brine submerging our hands,
shaking free of the woodstork,
linear, then fluid, balancing warily
across puddles and ruts
shell road, steaming after clouds
spend themselves into dissipation.

Rain is a language of those gone
before us, into shadow, sea swallowed,
middens and hammocks longing
for lost songs, palmetto restless
in their absence, the first shower
redeems tree frogs, having endured
dry season, a vast singing commences.

Taste of sky and a chorus
of small voices, liquid calling of grackles,
ink pooled then taken to flight, 
morning rain, wiregrass 
thick with spider webs collapsing.
Rain is the sleep of clouds
come to restore flow
in the diminishing aquifer, rain
is cottonmouth swallowing
its own tail, body of iron,
body of cloud, sparking wildly.

Rain is the last libation poured 
from the blue bowl before our hands 
go cold, our tongues reduced to ash,
clouds flowering wetness, fragmentation 
of self, so much longing lifted skyward into cold,
approaching emptiness, frozen
shards spilling, precipitation is how we name
the light flowing through water, from sea 
to sky to sink then the long darkness
of karst and aquifer.

Peach Delphine is a queer poet from Tampa, Florida. Former cook infatuated with what remains of the undeveloped Gulf coast.