Meditations In A Winter Rain

I

Turn a glance, love, and take your cue from that
Which quietly anoints this winter night
Amid the vague threat of the muffled beams
Approaching: that unmeasured, rain-washed light
Stands, in turn, for all we cannot fathom
In what might lie before us in this rain:
Certainty, uncertainty in tandem
Mark our footsteps: will pleasure or will pain
Attend upon upon this duet of the will?
The phosphorescent overcast is mute.
The city has no judgement to proffer.
Naked, hand-in-hand, we face a spectrum,
Hoping that its colors will concur
And override the vagueness of these beams,
Touching an earth where all is as it seems.


II

Arrival has its own lingua franca:
The drawing-near’s familiar as the part
Where Bogey touches Ingrid Bergman’s cheek:
Departure, too, has flourishes of art.
Arrival, though: there’s joy in the moment
When buildings reassume their daytime size,
Traffic grows, accelerates to normal,
Gravity reasserts its soft surmise.
Clutching roses, beyond security,
Compulsive with my watch-stem as I pace,
I reacquaint myself with that language,
Forming among its phonemes your dear face,
Enunciated out of distant light,
A gift from the indifference of the night.

III

Chimeras that shimmer between two blinks,
Those that haunt spaces bridging the deep,
And the shallow, well-lit edge of day’s shore,
Are night’s mysteries: what’s limned upon sleep?
An obtruding face threatens violence:
You bite his tongue off: what’s lurking in there?
I’m somewhere off around a blank corner,
The source and beginning of all this fear,
And wondering why. Come blasts of white noise,
Renewing confusion that most call sense,
We infer paths through these cobwebs of night,
Parsing fear, for patterns that might convince.
90 feet of water: we’re treading slow,
Aware of how dear is daylight below.

IV

In that Dali picture with melted clocks,
I think there’s a sundial in the foreground
Somewhere, and among the imagined rocks,
Memory seeks redemption in the sound
Humming from the head, as eyes scrape the ground
For its own summed-up footprints in the sand.
With love subsumed in years, we may have found
Those old footprints an unpleasant command.
Around the ancient sundial they go,
Not fading: they insistently intrude
Upon the meadows we would like to know,
The faded glades we’d like to see renewed.
Love, lift your hand: together we’ll unmake
Those traces, and their semaphores will break.

V

“The branches whip like women’s hair,” I wrote.
(It’s okay, I’m allowed to quote myself.)
My thought was of what bad weather denotes,
Which is nothing: bad weather is a self-
Delusion; nature knows of no such thing.
Turkey vultures are gorgeous on the wing,
Ugly on the windowsill. No judgement
Adheres to their appearance in daylight,
And thus, a blasting rainstorm, toward midnight,
Which rips the screen door loose from its hinges,
Only means the universe is benign:
It doesn’t even note our joy or fright.
I watch two blessings spin, one black, one blue.
So all the more’s the un-blessing of you.

VI

Freeze-frames in a box, ten to what power,
Beyond what’s piled at the foot of the bed,
Jumble like salad: a minute, an hour:
Here, a quantum from the week we were wed,
Buzzes in the dry air, a cigarette end
Floating in the darkness: you softly sleep
As the train south rounds a murderous bend.
Between two beats, the shutter ratchets: deep
Within the freeze-frames, that moment’s buried,
The train blasts from the tunnel into light;
A second later, everyone’s married;
An untold story sinks back into night.
Now there’s a tremor of that train’s return,
Loaded with pictures that dazzle and burn.