Wet Again |
[Nov. 20th, 2016|06:37 pm]
rejectomorph
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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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