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rejectomorph

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Wet Again [Nov. 20th, 2016|06:37 pm]
rejectomorph
Again there has been rain all day, the gray sky merging with the dimmed landscape through small drops of water that shaded the distance to a haze which, now and then, was made to shimmer by some stray light that eased its way through the heavy clouds. Now that night has fallen, sight has given way to sound, and the spattering of raindrops briefly halted by yellowing leaves fills the darkness with monotonous music.

The music will fade away in time, and as this sort of late autumn storm brings no thunder the storm will die like someone dying alone in a dark room, their last rattle of breath unheard. By then I'm likely to be asleep, and will not know. The feral cats, trapped on the porch much of the day, will bear witness, and then go abroad to explore their soggy world. They will tell me nothing tomorrow when the sun returns to life.

But the grass will remember the rain in its fresh green burgeoning, and those shrubs that can do so this time of year will send out some new leaves. There will be reminders, but I don't know that I will notice them as such once they are here. The memory of this rain will wash over memories of past rains and be washed over by future rains in turn, There will be more rain this very week. A wet autumn, as I'd hoped. Something will grow, even if not I.




Sunday Verse



To Elsie


by William Carlos Williams


The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure—

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags-succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum-
which they cannot express—

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an
agent—
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs—

some doctor's family, some Elsie—
voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us—
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
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