to keep a thing from leaving

All you can talk about is that storm from last night.  
Blowing out every synonym you know  
for strong and dark and wild,   
you reenact its rage as if you, too,   
were born of booms and whooshes.  

Good work, baby, watching that rain all night  
and naming those unseeable sounds for me  
as I slept tight and curled and crooked, slept straight   
through it, seems my eyes never open wide enough  
to witness the ruin around me.

Instead of watching midnight loss, I found you  
building paperweights in a factory in my dream.   
How deceiving a mass wrapped in clear beauty can be,   
weighted and wanting only touch, such   
a perfect way to keep a thing from leaving, you say:  

It’s always the wind that no one sees coming.   
Last night so many trees and yards,   
parked cars and plants and people blew away,  
an entirely new town was made by morning,   
just a few miles down the street.  

Now you turn to face the window, lament  
the soft ground and growing grass, shake your head  
from inside and sigh at what the wind left behind.
Have you tried telling the grass to stop living,
that you don’t like how it moves for you?    

Only the dead know words like still and forever,   
I know tomorrow I’ll be better at waking up  
quick and thin and ready to shape myself  
into your missing thing, I’ll blow  
your sleeping arm  from atop my quiet chest  
and chase that unseeable newness  
just a few miles down the street.