Monsoon in Cassopolis, Michigan.

The horizon is smudged.

The cattle huddle,

sodden sentries by the gate.

It has come: the autumn deluge

following September’s implacable

drought. The pasture floods.

River turtles burrow in mud.

I conjure Hampstead, England,

the London suburb where Keats

began his dying: rented rooms,

foul with the stench of consumption,

sheets and bedclothes damp.

It rained there too, and the rain

blew through the once dry

prairie grasses that were his lungs.