When Demeter grew too tired 
           to keep searching, she trusted herself
                        to sink down beside the dirt road and cross

one thin leg over the other,
           and mourn—not for the dead,
                        for the living no longer with her.

She’s like me this morning as a muttering surrounds:  
           tinny ping from seeping gutter-seams; 
                        splats slide off rhododendron leaves;

First mockingbird call. Second.
           World quenched momentarily. 
                        Once everyone wakes this morning, once you

wake in your house away from mine,
           this rain will have become
                        invisible difference. I, too,  

want to become one of many 
           filtering drops into earth,
                        be all that’s damp, settled—the fatigue

of Demeter.  Such relief in giving up.                         
           Beige ripples of skirt folding
                        in beige dust from the road.