FAUTE DE MIEUX

by Will Cordeiro

Late afternoon. Clouds sprawling overhead,
a somnolent gray fug of suet, 
details diluted in the middle distance
muddling an ominous gray pool of ether
with a sharp sweet scent of creosote all through it.
Soon, the dead still air’s the tight skin of a drum;
a crud and dogslop monochrome when falls
the first fat raindrops like a semi-colon.
A nascent thunder growls the edge
of earshot. Nearer, mizzle’s hissing static. 
Then the overcast lashed over us has shattered.
Within a blink, we’re fools in rainfall’s dazzle.    
But two quick blocks we’re back indoors, 
snookered with our lookout eyes a-gimbal. 
Bound-in alone we’re twinkling and opaque.
Bedded down with shadow-nourished middens
of old books, we vegetate, wax saturnine, 
and quite forget to take our lunch, engloomed,
as summer’s first monsoon tattoos the windows.
Such scufflings past the patient hours’ patter,
the rankled boscage splashed and flourished,
we ruminate on our displacement; faint 
redolence of ozone over muckling rubbish. 
Well, my gracious, isn’t this how days go by
and take us with them? When we trot outside,
an afterlight—pale clementine—backdrops 
dark mountains, motley wreckage, bones 
of cholla rotting at odd angles in the park.
Pink tattered clouds have put down anchor
in scattershot bright latticework of puddles.

Will Cordeiro has work published or forthcoming in 32 Poems, AGNI, Bennington Review, Pleiades, and The Threepenny Review. Will won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award for Trap Street. Will is also coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024). Will coedits Eggtooth Editions and lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.