PoetryEtc Featured Poet: Mark Weiss   

After ten years I visit a friend through whose fingers
everything passes. He tells
endless unfinished stories.
Later,
driving home,
a thundercloud over the highway,
I think of crazy Ruskin and his clouds
that changed--not his perception, but the clouds themselves,
becoming sinister.
How a life
can demand of you what you can't sustain.
On the radio
Bizet frames his tragedy with a folksong that calls to mind
a life of herding in the mountains,
beloved solitude.
And then
in the face of the final disaster
she laughs, Carmen,
who knows what's coming.
Under the black sky the trees
are flooded with sunlight.
They blow in the wind.