Let me read you a good poem

It's raining and blowing in Indiana today. I love it when it rains, as long as it doesn't do it every day. When I lived out West, I loved the heat and sunshine, but some days I would nearly pray for clouds or rain just for a change. People there thought I was crazy.

As I sit inside today, I see the rain has been blown sideways into the picture window, and is running down it. The red bud trees are no longer pinkish red - the tiny heart-shaped green leaves are emerging, into a new phase for the row of trees. Irises have now replaced tulips in the yard.

The following poem has spoken to me ever since I first read it in The New Yorker magazine a year or so ago. It made me find it in a stack of magazines, and read it to myself again and clip it out. Sometime later, it then called me to make my partner sit and listen to me read it aloud in the driveway - I may have indulged kind patience in this more than once. I am addicted to this poem. The author was a professor at the University in Austin, Texas - I've seen the bridge where the roosting of millions of bats occurs there. It doesn't really get in people's way. People need to respect bats and protect them; for one reason, they play an important role in pollinating plants worldwide.

Delphiniums in a Window Box

Every sunrise, even strangers' eyes.

Not necessarily swans, even crows,

even the evening fusillade of bats.

That place where the creek goes underground,

how many weeks before I see you again?

Stacks of books, every page, characters'

rages and poets' strange contraptions

of syntax and song, every song

even when there isn't one.

Every thistle, splinter, butterfly

over the drainage ditches. Every stray.

Did you see the meteor shower?

Did it feel like something swallowed?

Every question, conversation

even with almost nothing, cricket, cloud,

because of you I'm talking to crickets, clouds,

confiding in a cat. Everyone says,

Come to your senses. and I do, of you.

Every touch electric, every taste you,

every smell, even burning sugar, every

cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples

at the farmers' market, every melon,

plum, I come undone, undone.

-Dean Young