Rain-Swept Sunday

Rain-Swept Sunday

Bored, he comes wandering
into the kitchen
a high-pitched whine rising above
the boiling pots,
spaghetti bobbing
for itself like some
throwback to Narcissi
at the pond

the gentler gods of the kitchen
under the yellow light
dancing stillborn on the well-worn floors

he turns, still fretful,
to the window

and outside, the tree
bent almost double, in glinting sequins
as though Neptune himself had
spun the spume of some
torrential wave and left it,
hanging, on the shivering fingers
the whipping branches

he shivers, turns back inside,
where on the counter all the variations
the swell and rise of
of peppers soothes him

but his mother, gunshy from
the wind's moaning
about the corners
of the weathered house
rushes to turn him out

his whine turns upward
shivering on the rafters
keened precisely in tune
with the gale outside