THE RAIN MAKES THE NIGHT LOOK BLACKER

THE RAIN MAKES THE NIGHT LOOK BLACKER

The rain makes the night look blacker.

Wet anthracite. Panthers and lacquer.

Slash of the storelights in efflorescent

water gardens that fountain and gutter

with every passing car. A poor man’s

Alhambra. A mistake to drive the Muslims

and Moriscos out of Spain like poets

you’d been plagiarizing to give Platonic court

to unattainable, wealthy patrons you adored

because they could afford it. Not much

of a troubadour if your heart hasn’t got

a voice of its own. Or your lute’s a guitar

with a broken neck. Or is it an origami swan?

Lamp-posts reflected in the double pane

thermal windows like deep sky objects

in the narrowing field of view as if

someone threw a spear in the eye

of the Hubble telescope in the time-honoured

tradition of what to do if you meet

a Cyclops in orbit and you’ve just jettisoned

the third stage of the rocket you’re tied to.

Got to be a church around here somewhere

like a Neptunian shepherd moon fish farming.

God’s a wild salmon full of eggs. Fingerlings

of the traffic lights streaking their colours

clean as dawn. You can muzzle science

like a dancing bear in a political circus,

but you can’t stop the dharma of the disease

when people aren’t free to move around

mentally at ease with their unlikely similitudes.

There’s a lady singing up the street

at a bar a friend of mine owned before

he killed himself and left the rest of us

to wonder how sad it can get, and she

really belts like factory on the graveyard shift.

Her voice seems to carry further in the wet

than the wind on Fridays trying to teach

dry leaves on a brittle day to sing the blues.

Not missing anyone tonight. Not even

who I was yesterday anymore than I will

this idle delusion trying to track fish

upstream while everything’s flowing

the other way, and the small rain down can rain.

Not callous, indifferent, or aloof. Alone.

Though solitude’s not much to write home about.

It’s still perilous for me. I’d say the point it makes

is elusive if it ever flashed me a sign

I wasn’t living in a medieval guildhall

for stone masons who died a hundred

and fifty years ago devoting their skills

and their lives to permanence for the rich.

And a canal to keep Kingston supplied.

And a lodge to go occult in before you died.

Something else the west stole from the Arabs

like a secret Mechanic’s Illustrated to symbols.

I believe in live and let live. It’s all water

anyway, whatever way you flavour it

to make it more palatable to the life that wastes it.

The rain is a spider with the briefest of webs.

Water music sweet enough to bring tears to your eyes

in a glass palace of home-made harpsichords

and self-styled mirrors at the end of October.

A good rain that washes out the road.

Not drizzle to keep the dust down.

A flood myth not the eye of blood

that spiritualizes the post mortem of the rose.

PATRICK WHITE