Late Clearing

All day the lid stayed on the city. Nobody hung out washing. Kitchen lamps burned through noon.

Toward six the cloud went somewhere else the way a guest goes, without fuss, and left the whole sky open,

clean, a blue going darker, just after the sun had gone down behind Petřín.

Fair is fair: it came too late for anything you'd plan. Too late to dry a sheet.

Not too late to stand in the yard and feel the cold come straight down with nothing in the way,

the ground handing up what the day put into it to a sky that doesn't hand it back.