Like an English Summer Rain

some women master mirrors
in gas stations and motel rooms,
learn to get by
when july deepens fastbreath 
or uncertain hands.

they count tips in denny's, 
lying themselves into poetry,
blending into the pavement
in pigeon shit gray— 
elegy clinging to pores
like perspiration.

the ashtray girls, their bodies 
tree stumps in mud, fashioned 
in the light of sour milk  
and insult.

they buy french sleepers to weep in, 
whisper abandonment, carry 
love light, like a wafer 
on the tongue.

they pick up pennies, study them
for signs of age, see months become 
smoke in still rooms along 
the back streets of eden. 
ladies, hardened to glass, 
they lose children in supermarkets,
—if sang to 
they would splinter.

they will sink into the cold,
minutes becoming urgent, where everything 
will be counted like meter money, 
like days that pass 
with rain and nothingness.