BECKY KENNEDY

Driving After Rain

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2024: VOL. 39.

Driving after rain through time’s
morning, the streets wept clean. Damp-
stained bark of the sycamores:
cicatrix of what stays. Wet
palm of sky fills the windows,
and the waving branches: when
the trees shake, rainwater pearls
the windshield between us. In
the largeness of light, the world

arrives, sun inventing each
thing it touches—but you know
how it is here, the way light
is and isn’t, is again.
The way light fixes things, as
if seeing could make it so.
But how to live without, as
in the dream in which we’re both
alive without needing to

be, and the leaves spinning out
of themselves, you turning from
where we’re headed and going
on without me. The way I
saw you everywhere. Shatter
of leaves through the trees now, the
notes of the gardens nothing
but brightness: the rain’s what’s gone;
what’s unseen is everywhere.

Becky Kennedy is a linguist and a college professor who lives with her family in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and in three chapbooks and has been anthologized; her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared on Verse Daily.