The Last Rain

run down
run down,
down
the railroad tracks of course,
down into the throats
and the gullets of the cities.

The last pump organ,
which is 10 years old and making noise,
is hard to flood
but getting close—

the loose brown water
sloshes around the
bottoms of our boots
like hallucinations
in the eyes
of medicated dying men;

expelled from the blowholes
of humpback whale calves
on their journeys from Ant-
-arctica
to Greenland
trying not to drown.

One man escapes
the blast furnace of water
and runs
mad
with a black umbrella
across the grass
and up a hill
where there is no house,

only a
black Lab
on a square of wood
guarding a white box
containing her old friend:

small ashes and the
skull
of a green parakeet.

He pats her hard head
and thanks her,

and hears the sound of a 1 dollar bill
screaming at the bottom of a
goldfish bowl.