A sense of rainy-day permission settles in these sleepy mornings he toddles in, climbs up to lie beside me in my bed, a silent morning ritual we have observed since he was born. Haven’t we always been two bodies curled inside a single moon shell? Facing me, his breathing eases. Through the window I am watching that distant thread of purple smoke rise, another fire, and think of the jacaranda that fell last June in a summer storm. I still miss it. They say the Sonoran summer is two distinct seasons— no rain for a hundred days, then deluge. A monsoon shift in the direction of the wind. We are on the cusp. Soon he will be too old for this; the change will be abrupt as the first day of second summer. A wall of dust will rise at dusk, particles reaching toward the broom, a whisk to sweep the desert air, the cloth of sky emerges from the pail dyed indigo. After so many days without a single wisp of high cirrus, the promise of rain. Perfume of creosote. He sleeps, the small ellipse of his mouth close to my neck. I stroke his hair, his ear, and for a few minutes the sunlight has transformed the bed into a cloud. How desperate I must be to see one here. A desert wanting rain so much finds ways of defying gravity. I do want, need, for this to have a name before it’s gone, the scent of his breath rising up, intermingling with mine, and borrow the word they gave the scent of desert rain as it reaches dry ground.
Kelly Houle is a writer and visual artist whose poetry has been published in Crab Orchard Review, Red Rock Review, Sequestrum, and Written Here and There: Community of Writers Poetry Review 2020 Anthology. She has an MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University.
