Poem: Rain Universe

 

Rain Universe

 

can anyone count the worlds born

in howl and sizzle now falling

among shoves of wind to smash

and be gone, utterly gone?

they were too quick for me.

i sought the spell of hue and ghost within

the spheres.  but the speed, it was

terrible.  it would take a microscope

and a camera that magnified

until oblivion became sane, a camera

that sliced time faster than

the scribbles of a mad god filling

the sky with water.  only then maybe

would there be a song in a raindrop,

a glint that gave back the bard

i sent to find the dreamt artifact,

a gleaming blinding jewel of an eye. 

this eye that would not care about eons.

something in its gaze would last.

the war of horizontal and vertical

would become mere lines.  the faster

that worlds fell and died the stronger

it would get.  as the instant of its

life shrank it would grow to encompass

the storm, leaving it far behind,

as a tide leaves a cowry on the shore.

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This poem was originally published in Blue Unicorn.   I’m not sure of the date due to poor record keeping on my part.  Maybe 2006?  I am going to start re-publishing poems published in the past on this blog.  Why?  A big part of it is the potential end of the US as I knew it, and my concern that I will be incarcerated.  I am, too, in my 60s, and could die of natural causes, exacerbated by grief and anxiety at the loss of the country I knew all my life.

 

Expect more poems like this, and so a bit of a different poetic voice--who I was ten or more years ago.  Probably smarter.  And saner.

(I will point out, for every poem I published back then, there were many, many rejected poems.  I still work with those old drafts, trying to wrestle them into shape.  And most of the poems I've posted over the past five or six years on this blog (2021-2026) are of such a nature.)