Not Only Water

What I hear is not only water but rain. But isn’t rain water? No, rain is rain. Rain is water, yes, but rain is also life in thought and beautiful drops, beautiful contours, that splatter into puddles, which are something else again. Rain unties the knot of the sky and lets its burden fall. Rain is acrobatic and measles. Muddles and muddies the ground. Rain is to water what words are to a paragraph: the paragraph is a puddle, words fall individually in drops, beads, secrets spilled and expanded into an aesthetic, an elegant pain called poetry.  

Why pain? Writing reveals, always, the wound of existence. Which is often also a pleasure.  

All that I hear is me and tinnitus.  

The vast splendor of air in mid-August luscious and glazed in the streets.  

The lucid air of Vermeer, which is filled with sleeves and maps and pearls. Which is a crowning of space, a scripture of paint, the color of serenity exciting a sense of honest calm.  

This is about nerves. Impulse and mahogany. Consciousness in light. A universe made of dots, as in Dagwood, in which Blondie has a zip code and bathes alone. And is sometimes a lion of femininity.  

Sometimes I might hear a stone. It permits personality to occur because the stone is a stone and does not have a personality. Unless the stone smiles, in which case the stone is not a stone but a face of stone. Theodore Roosevelt or Crazy Horse. 

People shine red when their mouths open. Otherwise, they eat in silence, flipping pages of a book or magazine, or staring into a laptop screen, or tiny Smartphone app. The world has turned electronic. In the days of my youth it was psychedelic. Now it’s all pixels and apps and algae rhythms.  

Downtown there are hats. Rifles. The vibrant life of the crowd. The thirst for genuine experience. A baroque wildlife epitomized by water in the Cascades, our local mountains, our naked rain.  

Let’s not forget waterfalls and fungus. Lichen on rocks creating beautiful tapestries of nuance and intricacy. The milk of harmony which is alive as a glossary of dirt and its vocabulary of fertility and rot. Its wonderful paradoxes of life in death and death in life. And in which the eggs of dragons are leathery and white and await the agitations of new life, new wings and flames.  

The spots were there before the leopard, says Whalen. Now explain the panther. 

I can’t explain the panther, but what is this fascination with names? Naming things is a focus. Naming the water rain is a sewing of relations, a rapture of anther and pen.