Everything exists within the skin on a hot night in a house
permeable by bugs, open windows begging for rain. Pricked
by mosquito, I itch, specific to wrist or to the top of the thigh,
or the heel of the hand, hard as armor. Nails scratch but cannot
penetrate the subdermal deposit of poison. Sleep floats me
as if in scalding water. Years ago, evenings like these, we chased
the cows into the barn, made the water hot for their pre-milk
washing, set shoulder to flank and used rags to wipe clean
the smooth skin of teat and udder. Fans sucked air out the wide
windows but did not cool. Legs pasted with hay, thighs
kissing, sweat dripping slick beneath my breasts, I learned
to discern relief in finger-wide strips of skin, ran hoses
on my ankles, chilled my blood to pain. In the summers
without rain the waiting hung over us like an old fashioned
scythe nailed to a barn wall for nostalgia’s sake but no less
terrifying in its power to drop darkness. At stake?
Bankruptcy, losing the whole damn farm. I long
for those days, when I lived without hesitation, knew
the cows by touch, by shape, by the puff of breath or the swing
of head, knew them by the heat they threw, the teat long
or small, hot for a mouth or a hand. After milking, my father
lay in the grass wiping away mosquitoes as swallows swooped
over us, come down with the evening and what dew the sky
could spare us, sipped up by the corn. I wait the sky’s cool hand
to come rest on my forehead. I am lost, but for the drought,
I am homeless, but for the heat and the solace of night
come without rain.