.
Black cars throb past pavements blue with rain.
Soot black air under candlestick-like street lamp.
The pavement smokes. A sentence forms. Black puddles
Gather leaf matter. Particles of dead mind,
Language massing without message: twisted
Ghosts pissing the changeless grammar of the rain.
Oil puddle on pavement in the rain: photo by Roger McLassus, 2006
Raindrops falling on water: photo by Juni, 2004
yes. nice.
ReplyDeletei love puddles and the way they talk to me... the way they translate the language of rain...
ReplyDelete:)
Tom,
ReplyDeleteNo rain but many, many cars, whose sound in middle of night or now, as it's getting light, COULD be sound of waves in channel. . . .
1.15
first pink cloud on horizon above shadowed
building, sandstone-colored wall in lower
left foreground, sound of cars in street
size of particles depend on
components, represent
“curvature” of circle, time
therefore, written in
corner of wall against cloudless blue sky,
shadowed green of building across from it
Wonderful Tom !! Again !!
ReplyDeletePuddles are nice.
Riding on the offspring ripples
of an intermittent early morning rain
is a pebble. A gray sky residing in the shallow,
once dormant
still stagnant puddle,
fails to stifle the clamor,
of shrieking drops disappearing, being ensnared by the soil.
Indeed I do love the rain, "per se".
ReplyDeleteBut owning no car and limping along city pavements in it, forever, sometimes "gets old" -- no, wait, it is one who is getting old. The rain is forever young.
Speaking of old, an old, collapsing house, with old people in it, leaking everywhere, sliding down a muddy hillside in the rain... this, I think, is where those winter "ghosts" come in, with their slippery grammar, intractable, impossible to parse.
But if one is to be caught in a downpour or washed away in a flood, what better way to do it than in the company of several excellent poets, reminding one that Spring flowers may yet pop up through the slick asphalt.
And then again, judging by this and
ReplyDeletethis, it seems I've always been all wet.
Excellent Tom! Love the tempo and flow of this.
ReplyDeleteThank you Leigh.
ReplyDeleteAbout the tempo--what gets me about the changeless grammar of rain is the weird atemporality, the way it stays the same even you play it backwards.
Everything pissed away, ghosts, history...
What makes us sad is perhaps not the rain but the clouds it comes from? After all, a spring rain on a bright day is a delight. It's the grey heaviness above the rain that weighs down upon us, and sometimes the rain itself is a relief from that pressure.
ReplyDeleteYes, Zeph, but what we have going on with this El Ninõ event -- which we are to expect to last through the springtime -- is layer upon layer of that grey heaviness of which you speak, so that when one discharges itself (often violently this past week, with strong winds, hail, lightning and thunder), the relief is very brief, for a new layer is already advancing and weighing down with its oppressive pressure. I must say it is getting more than a bit tiresome at this point, though as we're told to expect four or five months of it, I suppose we'd do well to become accustomed to it somehow.
ReplyDeleteThe relation of this phemomenon to global warming remains a much worried question, and coincidentally I found myself in the role of the village idiot on a thread discusssing an article on the subject posted by a geophysics expert at a blog called RealClimate. The coincidental part was that the man (Raymond Pierrehumbert) had spoken in his post of having just turned in his new 700 page book on climate change to Cambridge University Press, referring to it as "animula". It seems the scientists didn't get the reference until one of them found my blog post addressing the poem by the dying Emperor Hadrian with that title ("animula blandula, vagula").
This was so nice, especially when I read it aloud. It sounded exactly the "changeless grammar of the rain." Lovely.
ReplyDeleteOtto,
ReplyDeleteThanks.
It is a sentence that cannot be declined.
Glub.