When I knew, it was raining. <br />Winter in decline. I was tired. <br />You in your soaked shirt diffused <br />into the western sky bulging with clouds, <br />speeding cars a few feet away— <br />why would they not slow down? <br /> <br />Though afternoon, a slip of moon <br />busied itself with rising, <br />and it had to mean something. <br />If only the moon were not out. <br />You shoveled the crushed tortoise <br />and her eggs off the highway into the dirt. <br /> <br />Those soft, white eggs. <br />This is how I love you: <br />drenched with Florida rain <br />and looking like hell, <br />Florida itself a hell, <br />the moonlit rain a rain of fire.<br /><br />Deborah Ager<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-tortoise-in-keystone-heights/
