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heavy rain The clock strikes noon on a day of unnaturally heavy rain. It’s moral to stay indoors, to stay out of it, but as usual I’m Temporising at the edge of an unwritten, bone-dry page. Truth is, an affair has neither ended to celebrate, nor begun, To make our poor poetic hearts sick with worries. The estrangements I feel are the ordinary ones Of a man who has made few close friends, except The memory of friendships like distant wars, wars of Hurried meetings and long betrayals when we were All so intense, and so very young. The house shudders in rain And wind, a wind unexpectedly hostile in mid-July. But the cold outside reminds me yet again how The brightest and biggest-hearted poets have a genius For friendship though the page before them is wet and cold: Something about them draws us out, as if, from our bone-dry Chairs, the clock striking, we rise to be drenched by rain. 78
page 79
the unexpected Early April suddenly ablaze and unexpected pear blossom As rampant as de Chardin’s sudden forms of life, as Delicate as the lacquerwork left over from a raid Of winter that scattered so many things since autumn – You could hardly fathom what April brought in on the breeze, What organic matter-of-fact things, what impolite cascade Of broken crockery in pink and green. It’s like that election Heard in the distance, beyond the fat privet hedge, An election that has even set the traffic lights on edge And caused this collision of ideas. From our quiet section I can hear anxieties rolling in. But are these not the same as last Time? Is she not the same? And he, is he not like a gardener Gone berserk, flat cap askew, trying to make regular What swarms. Life itself, that is, now swarming on the grass. 79

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heavy rain

The clock strikes noon on a day of unnaturally heavy rain. It’s moral to stay indoors, to stay out of it, but as usual I’m Temporising at the edge of an unwritten, bone-dry page. Truth is, an affair has neither ended to celebrate, nor begun, To make our poor poetic hearts sick with worries. The estrangements I feel are the ordinary ones Of a man who has made few close friends, except The memory of friendships like distant wars, wars of Hurried meetings and long betrayals when we were All so intense, and so very young. The house shudders in rain And wind, a wind unexpectedly hostile in mid-July. But the cold outside reminds me yet again how The brightest and biggest-hearted poets have a genius For friendship though the page before them is wet and cold: Something about them draws us out, as if, from our bone-dry Chairs, the clock striking, we rise to be drenched by rain.

78

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