7/20/08

The descent of rain into flower gardens and bushes
The turning of the overhead fan, audible from the friction
between the ball-bearings and the wheel upon which the fan turns
pushing colder air down until the living room is as cold as a tomb

I brushed the incipient mildew from several books that were in storage

A pamphlet for an experimental prototype of a helicopter or airship
whose wings are modeled on the dragonfly skirting the surface of a pond

A broadside declaring the imminent arrival of doomsday or the crisis
in capitalism, impending, according to the sundry voices

The tapering off of rain in early afternoon attended by the
weighting of the maple-leaves and the sodden branches
Would you putter around the garage if you had your own garage?

The drenching rains that visit us from the Canadian north

You must explain to the salt of the earth the ways of God to man
Another very green and wet Sunday afternoon as traceable as
the passage of youth into age or into ages of work into retirement
or the reification of one entire life into a plexiglass cube for family photos
and a selective eulogy--the rain thickens as the sky darken.

Mother told me there'd be days like this, the thickening of rain
among the branches results in moods of relaxation and abandonment
as if the toy ship were tossed among storms: toy boat, toy story.
Toy poem in which each word defers to a common and
ceremonial practice such as the phrase a month of Sundays
of rain and red slugs and the washing out of man-made roads
and trenching of new water--paths and furrows down watery banks
and flowery waters and watery flowers that could be called
a realignment of forces such as when finance dislocates careers
thought certain as the ground beneath one's feet and the
rock-bed beneath the ground. The flood plains by the riverbed
are a pre-Cambrian field of fern and dragonfly,
trees refuse to root in the sediment beneath. The potting soil
abandoned in a bag appeared black, bacterial and fecal
as it poured upon the freshly tilled soil, beneath which lies
fragments of a slate bed. From a shelf of slate rest garter snakes
when the sun is out, fattened from licking silverfish and spiders
from holes in the slate. The skunk's tail flung in the air,
each white fur strand a warning-barb, behind the uncut grass
rimming a ditch. In Sweden, a hill cannot be blasted for a new road
because residents have protested that it houses gnomes.
Elves however are forest-dwellers, gnomes are subterrranean,
living in kingdoms beneath the mountain. When black tar turns silver
and the air you breathe is saturated with water-droplets,
and rain drips from the roof and the porosity of tar-paper
holds the rain. Rims of wineglasses emitting a tone peculiar to it.
The reduction of life into granitic material, into coal from tar,
the apparition of silver when the tar is wet from light,
of surfaces on the paved road, the burden of leaves on the tree,
of fruit about to drop from branches. The absorbant surface of
thos Darth Vader fighter-bombers dropping their payloads upon
parched villages with mud huts and underground cells sniffed out
by satellites. Ignorance is bliss at such an altitude.

But the redneck said the will to win was sapped. Were he young
he'd spy on the back-stabbers. The voices of elites declared
him simple. That criticism was an inner voice that rankled
his insides.

The yellow warbler darted into a hedge along the road
of the industrial park.
The porta-potties on the cul-de-sac worked fitfully.
A gas main protruded from the ground.
Compactors had flattened the patio.