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Picnic Weather

Rainy day,
and here you stand,
picnic basket in your hand!

I’ll never get used to you
and your changing weather;
sometimes you’re too chilly for me,
but more often you are too warm, too humid,
too close for comfort.
Not that you are unusual;
I recognize that I’m the eccentric one,
the one who strangely embraces stasis.
(Some say my stasis is mere stagnation.)

Let me describe you,
as I’m not entirely sure
that you’re ever seen yourself
in mirrors unwarped by the weather.
You are brown-eyed blue-eyed green-eyed summer-eyed,
with some red-haired autumn-ness somewhere in your genes.
You are pale like winter, freckled with small, dark birds,
yet you smile like a long-awaited springtime rainshower.
Your tattoos are a breakneck slideshow of nature photographs;
your piercings change as rapidly as windblown pine needles.

So, that’s what you look like right now,
if you don’t like it, just wait five minutes.
I’ve taken to listening to the half-hourly forecast
whenever I’m wondering about you;
the radio’s weather reports
correspond directly
to the dramatic physical changes
in your appearance.

As for myself,
I have eyes like double-paned windows.
I have short hair like brown carpet.
I have skin of neutral wallpaper,
beige, no patterns,
and certainly no tattoos.
I smile like television.
My body art consists entirely of small, pink bandages.
I’ve always been like this.

So, excuse me
if I cannot see a future full of picnics for two.
My variety of optimism anticipates life staying stable;
I don’t invite climate change into my interior world.

I would need a change of clothes
if I picnicked with you
in this cold rain.

And it wouldn’t stop there;
you would probably want to
picnic next
in warm sunshine!

Picnicking with you,
out in all weathers,
would require
my body temperature
to rise or
drop
or at least fluctuate
by fractions of a degree.

Where in the world
would I find safety
if not in the constant temperature
my own body?

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