All through the rainy light the sculpt came through
magnified with stretchy glimmer
the stars dripped to earth
corneas each one.
Can you see yourself
broken and clear
letting the light right through yourself
changed by both
the viscose filter and the curve?
Of course it’s raining and how, the world is full of water talk there is nothing else on the radio. Even the moon’s out this evening, looking casual in grey among the clouds and how the light changes in her eyes. On the ground, rain sifts itself, joins itself and parts again. It is so long in the making holding hands for a few moments of fall. Then, good bye and into other arms.
The gurgle as it regroups, finds itself reunited all over the rooftops and then into the tanks. We have caught the rain, but only for a while. It will find its way away from our pipes and drains and channels, it will regrow the river, move the mountain, reach out its long tidal arms to try and embrace the moon. It is the hiss of static. The buzz that means nothing but rain on the wires.
The rain loves gravity, all these chemical force fields that we happily drink down and bring alive as we know it. One long branching. One long making water into us and then dispersing it again. Of course it’s raining. The soil drinks it down, the planet of clouds and radio waves with the moon hovering there like a luminous shadow loving gravity more and more every moment as it bends light through the sea to make the colour blue, then throws that last raindrop into your eye.
they are so buff
the light the shadow
the definition of them
crowding to bulges skin cannot know
tempting the magician in all of us
to say – I know, ididthatonce.
but it would be a lie
because the way they gain weight
and sturdy their tendons
is octopus swivel territory
through a loop in the wind they are
parading until they need to cry
The rain keeps time
with tiny lucid fingers
pass, little seconds, pass.
When I was a child
it was always autumn;
with the rain and fungus
the fruit and promise
the leaf-mould and running gutters
where fat worms wandered
through the clear as light water.
Once there was a frog,
grey and spangled at the thigh
exact yellow, exact black.
It would rain and I would wait
in the car and try to count
the droplets forming on the window
as they ran together like so many memories.
The cold would come and stalk
the stars at night
and in the morning we’d fog our laughing breath
and laugh at its whiteness
and how it came while we weren’t trying.
Exact fog white, the crispest kind.
In the afternoons we’d forget our woollen jumpers in the leaves
and traipse around at dusk
looking for that yellow cuff
in the places our games had travelled us.
We’d fill the green bucket with apples and
spend the afternoon cutting our woody
homegrown windfalls
to make jelly,
fingers were slit
and the blood was exact.
Strangely familiar
and unknown.
All night tiny hearts
on the roof, the stones rhythm
all over the trees and grass.
Was it you, too shy to knock?
But you run in under the window sills
finger your way down the windows.
The morning opened late and green
the flowers dewy and crisp
piled with moist and tears.
But, there were signs of you
trembling in the dark
dreaming up escape routes.
She is there on the cumulous
white light crisp like promises of rain
further from the sky where she wanders
at the break between shadow and its other.
There are wisps around her,
the credible tremble, the hunt onwards
for the next possible, the lightning strike
the storm in the space she breathes, there.
She moves in on wind gust, balancing on cloud-thread
like that, a dervish or a spindle, a whirring
the woolly pillow of cloud into the long drops
the watery light falls through her fingers.
The ribbed pattern of the wind is the brush of her fingers.
The long stroke of the sky
meditation of dropping, the luxurious water.
From here you can feel the cold breast of the sky
if nursing here the runnels of rain
have been sucked dry and any warm frames of light
succulent like honey barred beams
dried into powder themselves;
a day bees hate, with grey dissatisfaction
they fluff their buzzing bodies and frown down the wind.
But you, having nursed and found the fire’s warmth
in your bones you have no word for afraid
or refrain no other state than barefoot
even in the mud that licks you as you would lick the rain
and stick wet coldness
will fall off you
like air.
The jet plane year
Left streaks across the sky
(Above hefty cumulus
All shadow-wrinkles)
This smear of time
Unfastens its hold
(even on itself)
And returns to water drops
That take less than a second
to hit the ground
After the rain,
grass crickets
sing how drops sit
in memory there
on the blades.
Antidote’s boredom
flash the sound like
strobe ventriloquist.
How small those hands
reaching from pooled water;
how tiny the fingers of the rain.
And a million little fruiting bodies
hats, umbrellas, houses
only need the gift of water
to own the earth.
Beading now, drying
what becomes of the
rivulets we followed all day?
Down to the lake
where they hold – fingers twining –
a disco of frogs.
poemation 