clouds

V.50

Rain! Rain! On the river! Falling!
Oh my world! Heavying my hair!
‘Til it drips down my face! Oh rain!
Cupping my jawline exactly!

Rain! Dampening my clothes! Cooling
my shoulders and neck! hanging out
on the windscreen! Little deltas!
Dancing on the mud! just dancing!

Always a pleasure! Falling out
of the sky! or so they tell me!
I believe rain is liquid air!
That gets so bored sometimes it melts!

I believe rain is a sea spore!
Ready to grow a little sea!
Wherever it drops! It could be
anywhere! Like in your ear-hole!

The audiologist would gawp!
At the little ships, their foghorns!
And the sea mist forming cloudlines
which pour down your neck and caress!

I would spend days alone with it!
Which roars on the roof at night! So
passionate and so sensuous!
Each drop its own exclamation!

Best not to pronounce to a thing
its end, until the subtle end
is so current as to be read
easily in the cirrus and high

cumulus of the dull cloud-banks
spelled in mile high text out along
the north sea. Where it says – the end.
Like the end of an early film

perhaps with a full orchestral
fanfare and winged horses, what not.
Then it’s probably okay to
call it. Though we can just click

watch again. Let’s start it over
right now. A big bang, transformations,
and stellar forces spinning like
a universal whirligig

and then things happen and so on.
Really not much changes as things
grow more spread out until one thing
is quite the same as the other!

And beginnings are just as odd.
So, I let a few days go by, till
I thought their tears must be dried;
and then I set off for Pisa.

How your voice comes to me through doors
that shut too soon and leave me spent
ammunition on the pavement.
I hear each consonant as fire

crackles on a summer beach
beyond the waves a jellyfish
moans and those are vowels of your throat
singing, of your hair which hangs like

for like, eye for an eye, my eye
which is hooked like the subtle fish
wife in barbaric times. I want
to talk to you about Rosa

Luxembourg, about just how right
we are about the large, inapt
empty spaces between the clouds
where no thought interrupts the flat

tones and gradients of the air
in its wider form. Free of life.
Barbarism it seems is willed
by the people, and so we cut

onions to pretend we aren’t despair’s
pawns and playthings in an open
gambit. I want to hear your crisp cough
as we laugh too much while drinking