Rainy Season

Christmas Eve and the stacks of the paper mill slow for the
evening,
though the smell lingers stronger than salt or sea. Tanker
ships
with their red metal containers float like rusted gifts through
the straits.
And we, like the trees, bend and snap against the season’s
short days.
The whole town is soaked: winter rains fill ditches, flood
yards,
blur the windows so next-door Christmas lights twinkle twice.
Tomorrow,
we’ll unwrap piles of paper, and then the factory will begin
again—
pump the grime of cardboard and pine across the saturated
sound in
gray, sour clouds. That smell again. The pulp won’t dry till
spring.

:: Katherine Bode-Lang, Spring Melt (2009)