Always, before rain, the windows grew thick with fog.
Mist descended over the evening rooftops
and rain made generalities of the neighborhood.
Rain made red leaves stick to car windows.
Rain made the houses vague. A car
slid through rain past rows of houses.
The moon swiveled on a wet gear above it.
The moon-a searchlight suspended from one of the airships-
lit the vague face peering through the windshield,
the car sliding down the rain-filled darkness
toward the highway. The men controlling the airships
were searching for him,
and he passed through the rain
as a thought passes through the collective mind
of the state. Here I am in this rain-filled poem,
looking out my kitchen window into the street,
having read the news of the day-
we are hunting them in our neighborhoods,
they have no place among us-
and now the car has turned the corner and disappeared
into the searchlights that make from the rain
glittering cylinders of power.
Rain by Kevin Prufer | Garden Lavender Poetry Reed Diffuser
$15.00Price
Kevin’s Prufer’s newest books are The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Rilke Prize, and Sleepaway: A Novel (Acre Books, 2024). Others of his books have been listed as among the year’s best by The New York Times, Booklist, andPublishers Weekly and his poetry collection How He Loved Them (Four Way Books) was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award. He is the 2026 Poet Laureate of Texas and directs The Unsung Masters Series.
