RAIN IN A SMALL TOWN

Rain in a small town at the beginning of spring and some of the trees are wondering if they might need a root canal, while others are putting their shoulders to the sky that’s stuck like a wheel in the road mud of the same old equinoctial revolutions that lengthen the day at the expense of the night and call the adjustment even. Brides are mostly boring, but the bloom on the cherry-bough, and Venus in the foam, leave me breathless. And, yes, the young women are restored to the forms that got bundled away like astronauts for the winter, and, no doubt about it, my blood runs to the window quicker should one walk by a little slower than the rest, smouldering like an eclipse of the moon I’d be crazy to plant seed under, but there you go; not everything’s covered by the farmer’s almagest, and there are some prophecies that are easily mislaid. But mostly, the cocked hammer falls on a wet cap whenever I squeeze the trigger of the moon from my shamanistic, sniper’s nest high in the new branches of this visionary tree. Though the whole tree flare like a struck match in the shadows, it seldom proves the prelude of a star, and even less, the genius of a smokeless fire intense enough to endure its own clarity that it casts the lamp aside like a shoddy avatar and grants itself to itself as the only wish worth making. Whoever we are. Grass and grazer alike. Or something more urban like the crucifix of a televangel razor fixed in its pulpit to thresh the nations like wheat should they deny the blood of the lamb inks their book of blades, Jesus stabbed in the ribs by a pleading microphone. Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani. And the news crews gathering like shepherds. And the analysts come like wise men to parse the death. And the web sites sincere as a credit card. And in the last days of Al Dajl, the red-haired liar, remember, your God has two eyes; the liar, only one: Muhammad. When women dress like men, when sex is savagely free, when the shepherds of the black camel build tall buildings in the desert, and a tree is planted in Israel in which no birds sing, the last man shall be Chinese and he will grovel in the dirt at his sister’s feet. The bells have not sweetened for all the autumns they’ve hung on the tree, for all the windfalls of doom that have thundered in the garden only to be absorbed back into the earth like rain. And the voices that call us to prayer from the nibs of their towers, haunting as a childless swing, befall us like the pollen and seeds of a dark flower without the likeness of a lover. Lemming climacterics of apocalyptic rapture, a place in the lifeboat of belief, mercy packed like a parachute, and the rest of us hurled into flood, fire, off the cliff, hurled into cyberspace, out the dazzled windows, into the kitchen middens of the Tapeian rock. Google it if you haven’t the Greek. I’m leaving the room. Outside the spring. The down of maple buds, baby grackles, supple women, and the rain, small violets under the duff of the grove. Not the feeble flame of salvation flickering behind the lampblacks of doom, not you, standing on my threshold like a spiritual broom, or an eager vacuum cleaner salesman, throwing dirt on my flying carpet, to suck it up like a grave. Rain falling in a small town, and the leaves like poets rushing into print. On every tree, a billion pamphlets declaring my afterlife in paradise is not delayed. Heaven meaning concisely, no one to save. And later tonight, walking from encounter to encounter with the earth as it keeps its ancient places, out to the far fields alone, to bathe my eyes like birds in the light of the last watch as it changes constellations, the great guesses, the great myths, I will not know who I am or why I was born to wonder why I was born, to eat to be hungry, to walk, sit, sleep, love, wake, dream, defecate, and die. Maybe the mind makes this place and everything I’m looking at is my own face elaborated into stars and birds and willows in lemon lingerie, the way I suspect a poem is, or maybe, there’s no one looking out through the history of my masks that fall away like blossoms and poems without ever knowing the fruit that came of what they conveyed, but walking out like smoke that has strayed too far into the solitude of its candle, I shall gaze up at the stars, silently elated, washed in cool flames, and think that my life and the night and their gesturing light are all well met and served, if I should remember their names.

PATRICK WHITE