Rain Check

I remember you taking your rain check from me beside the stream. The chanterelles, the devil’s club, making a bed from our clothes. You let out your love like clouds full of rain and your voice rose to the tops of the Sitka spruce. You looked like you belonged there in the moss and dark, damp earth. A wild geranium.

And I felt like the outsider, an invasive weed with no place in a temperate rainforest. This inland-man from the high plains. You knew this and still you took me into you. Watching me turn like a leaf in the fall.