A QUICK NOTE CONCERNING THREE DAYS OF WRETCHED WEATHER

My wife does not understand writer's block.
No one who's never had it ever will.
It's not like having cancer
or going to war.
It's nothing that serious, and it's always
entirely my own fault. It's like remembering
a car crash with injuries, visualizing
the sheer inevitability of momentum and impact
and the perverse act of denial and will
trying to make it not happen. It's like remembering
a toothache that you know will come back.
It's like waiting for novocaine to wear off.

It's like waiting out three days of constant rain.
It's worse. It's like the day in the middle
when the sun came out and the sky turned blue
for an hour and a half
before the clouds swept in again
and the bone-chilling cold
pressed in with the gray rain.
It's like looking out at the yard
flooded with water killing the grass.
It's like watching the cold gray swirls
eat away relentlessly
and the banks of the creek
and knowing, dammit, knowing
that you have no way of knowing
when it will ever
if ever
end.

Jim Williams