It rained all day and then the next day and then it rained for the next one hundred years. Sometimes it came down hard and other times, just a light mist. People got used to it. It was expected and normal, like the fact that, in the morning, there’d be air to breathe.
People sunned in the rain. They swam and had parties, played ball, rode bikes, cooked out, drank wine and beer. People made love in the rain, divorced in a downpour, washed their cars in a drizzle.
In dreams, people often imagined clear, sunny days. They imagined dry fields and lawns, trees swaying in warm sunshine, lakes and ponds as smooth as a sheet of glass.
There were always a few in each town who couldn’t take it, who let the constant tapping on the roof and windows drive them nearly insane. …
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I pry up the bright coin of its lid. Behold — the destroyer of shirts, the speckler of grand pianos. True, I have turned the furniture to ghosts, and I have spread out The New York Times like a sidewalk along our walls. None of it matters. I have always believed too deeply in the steadiness of hands. I should know by now that ruin has a way of finding us, that only my toe print on the bedroom floor can prove that we resisted.
– Charles Rafferty…
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my mother, pearl, with folded hands, in rooms patiently waiting. her hands are a shimmering flame. time is precious in the inspiration. her wriggling in the doctor’s ear. a blanket for a shawl, taking three buses to the hospital in a blizzard to come get me. how is he getting better, when he believes the wall is a piano? at least he plays a real one at home. like the earnest search for the b section of a maple tree. not a figure yet, but the contours of one. he’s even composed pieces on and for the wall he calls “études for chalk piano and penumbral figures on the wall.” quite stunning really. the insistence that we be somebody somewhere impedes assembly. i’m in the middle of the piece with melody all around.…
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I.
The Garden
An enchantress sighs
in the room you thought empty, clearing a place for you. She calls out, this
seductive crone, in a language you almost recall. She needs to remind you of
something, but you have no way to respond beyond the ghost-like assent of your
presence. Beyond the barking of the dogs, below the level of speech is a place
that grants access, so you enter. She carries a lifetime of pain and loss. Hers
is an unassailable grief that finds release in the few remaining joys left to
her—calling birds down from the trees and feeding them from the palm of her
hand, bathing throughout the moonlit night in the tropical garden, loving the
humid air that pours the essence of jasmine, lemongrass and nightshade across
the ravaged contours of her flesh, a white cat the sole witness to the forms
she takes in her purposeful flight from pure earth to pure light.…
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i told my son you can reach me i am not the weather the same way my father was the weather i am not mystery or storm or the perfect day apology for the storm you can reach me i am willing to be shaken i used to be shaken all of the time you you you son you can reach me i have built a table too small to eat at so that we can sit there and hold no pursuit other than me what do you need
– Darren Demaree…
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And like a sailor, he lifts the blinds. In the distance, no matter how far he is in that VA nursing home, he sees us out here somewhere as we glide. Your elderly father sees you and me, our hearts as one woven kite on the porch swing just as night seems to nudge the sun aside. He knows we are falling in love.
After all, all our footprints in sand and snow and cinder and everywhere we go, we go two by two by love but look at how the world blends so small. He knows. Widowers may have a way of seeing all the power in believing, as somewhere way out there is yet a heavenly mother near her child.
He may remember his younger sky, and her beautiful eyes, and likely can see them still when you laugh and when you cry.…
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Names. You’ve got this thing with them. The names of plants, rocks, native species. Concrete details have become a favorite pastime.
Vehicles, clouds, chemical compounds.
You file names away in no particular order but know right where they are when you need them. And you will. Need them.
Architecture, muscles, functions.…
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