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A bride and a groom sitting in an open buggy in the rain, holding hands but not looking at each other, waiting for the rain to stop, waiting for the marriage to begin, embarrassed by the rain, the effect of the rain on the bridal veil, the wet horse with his mane in his eyes, the rain cold as the sea, the sea deep as love, big drops of rain falling on the leather seat, the rain beaded on a rose pinned to the groom’s lapel, the rain on the bride’s bouquet, on the baby’s breath there, the sound of the rain hitting the driver’s top hat, the rain shining like satin on the black street, on the tips of patent leather shoes, Hokusai’s father who polished mirrors for a living, Hokusai’s father watching the sky for clouds, Hokusai’s father’s son drawing rain over a bridge and over the people crossing the bridge, Hokusai’s father’s son drawing the rain for hours, Hokusai’s father rubbing a mirror, the rain cold as the sea, the sea cold as love, the sea swelling to a tidal wave, at the tip of the wave white.

rain frog          thorn bug          tent bat along a broken mosaic    a spongy    ever-dwindling path soaring trees    woody buttresses    their massive twisted fins lofty crowns    shoulder to shoulder    climbing lime-green vines    restless palms    one strangling plant    clinging to choking another    a discontinuous canopy of branches and leaves impenetrable    alive and teeming    tangled underbrush the deeply shaded soil    lumpy roots    writhing across the forest floor    low-growing ferns    seedlings struggling for light    jewel-colored hummingbirds insects sizzling and clicking and the dripping water trickling into the tiniest crevices    steamy claustrophobic air    a dazzling bellbird    lost in a shaft of sunlight    a golden eyelash viper sinuous as a vein on a broad-leafed frond    flat worms land leeches    walnut-sized spiders    goliath beetles camouflaged butterflies on dead leaves    parasites    bees leaf-cutting ants atop glorious white lilies    everywhere gripping    climbing    twisting    floating through the trees stilt-like aerial roots    the mouth-amazed pitcher plant buried larvae    fruit-eating fish    the perpetual battle to adapt the ruthless drive    to survive under a punishing sun what grows    bursts forth at astonishing speed    then decomposes to be reabsorbed    so much unknown    unfamiliar unnamed    but before long    the trees seem the same the rocks    every bird track    who would dare think of such a place who would dare        construct one         of his own imagining and be utterly abandoned    in the middle of it all if to be lost is to be fully present    if confusion becomes the only boundary    and then    the decision    [to divide space until a direction is created]    only a madman would begin thought is its own cage    the mind    already anticipating the first step    deciding    every turn will be coupled by disaster    and perhaps    some bestial creature crouched at the center    crying    waiting for our hero    our everyman    our Elijah wandering the earth in rags

From the Mithridatic Wars,  first century BC Our general was elsewhere, but we drowned. While he rested, he shipped us home with the bulk of  his spoils that had weighed his army down. The thrashing storm that caught us cracked the hulls and made us offerings to the sea floor — a rain of statues, gold, and men. Released from service, done with war, the crash and hiss muted, we fell through streams of creatures whose lives were their purpose. We settled with treasure looted from temples of rubbled Athenian Greece; among us, bronze and marble gods and goddesses moored without grace, dodged by incurious fish. Their power was never meant to buoy us — our pleasures were incidental gifts — but, shaken by their radiance in our dust, we had given them our voices. Their faces, wings, and limbs lie here with our sanded bones and motionless devices. Little crabs attempt to don rings set with agate and amethyst, and many an octopus, seeking an hour of rest, finds shelter in our brain-cases. So we are still of use.

It may be as close as an old man in Michigan comes to the sound of the sea. Call it thunder if you want, but it’s not thunder, not at all. It’s more like the rush of semis on a freeway somewhere between Bay City and Flint, the road a son will take when he learns, sometime around the last taste of a strap, that the life he was born to is nothing at all like a life he’d ever bother to live. There’s an anger in it, a tin-edged constancy that has no rhythm, quite, something more like white noise that still won’t let you sleep. Think of some man, needing to get a crop in, but the fields are sop, so he’s trying to find something to fix, something to keep his hands working, something to weld, something to pound, something to wrap his calloused palms around that might do less damage than a lead-rope knotted and tossed over the limb of a tree. If you ever decide to lose your years by working this land, you might think again, about the barn you build, or roofing it with tin.

Clouds spout upon her Their waters amain In ruthless disdain, – Her who but lately Had shivered with pain As at touch of dishonour If there had lit on her So coldly, so straightly Such arrows of rain: One who to shelter Her delicate head Would quicken and quicken Each tentative tread If drops chanced to pelt her That summertime spills In dust-paven rills When thunder-clouds thicken And birds close their bills. Would that I lay there And she were housed here! Or better, together Were folded away there Exposed to one weather We both, – who would stray there When sunny the day there, Or evening was clear At the prime of the year. Soon will be growing Green blades from her mound, And daisies be showing Like stars on the ground, Till she form part of them – Ay – the sweet heart of them, Loved beyond measure With a child’s pleasure All her life’s round.

If I ever get over the bodies of women, I am going to think of the rain, of waiting under the eaves of an old house at that moment when it takes a form like fog. It makes the mountain vanish. Then the smell of rain, which is the smell of the earth a plow turns up, only condensed and refined. Almost fifty years since thunder rolled and the nerves woke like secret agents under the skin. Brazil is where I wanted to live. The border is not far from here. Lonely and grateful would be my way to end, and something for the pain please, a little purity to sand the rough edges, a slow downpour from the Dark Ages, a drizzle from the Pleistocene. As I dream of the rain’s long body, I will eliminate from mind all the qualities that rain deletes and then I will be primed to study rain’s power, the first drops lightly hallowing, but now and again a great gallop of the horse of rain or an explosion of orange-green light. A simple radiance, it requires no discipline. Before I knew women, I knew the lonely pleasures of rain. The mist and then the clearing. I will listen where the lightning thrills the rooster up a willow, and my whole life flowing until I have no choice, only the rain, and I step into it.

My mother weeping in the dark hallway, in the arms of a man, not my father, as I sat at the top of the stairs unnoticed— my mother weeping and pleading for what I didn't know then and can still only imagine— for things to be somehow other than they were, not knowing what I would change, for, or to, or why, only that my mother was weeping in the arms of a man not me, and the rain brought down the winter sky and hid me in the walls that looked on, indifferent to my mother's weeping, or mine, in the rain that brought down the dark afternoon.

It ends badly, this glass of wine, before you drink it you have to drink a prior glass, before you sip you gulp, before you chug the bottle you pour it down your throat, before we lie together naked, we divorce, before we rest we grow old, it ends in chaos, but it is delicious, when we wake it is the past, we are the faces staring from the high lit window, the unmet lovers, the rivals who do not exist, united in a radiance that will not fade at dawn.

When my older brother came back from war he had on his forehead a little silver star and under the star an abyss a splinter of shrapnel hit him at Verdun or perhaps at Grünwald (he’d forgotten the details) he used to talk much in many languages but he liked most of all the language of history until losing breath he commanded his dead pals to run Roland Kowaski Hannibal he shouted that this was the last crusade that Carthage soon would fall and then sobbing confessed that Napoleon did not like him we looked at him getting paler and paler abandoned by his senses he turned slowly into a monument into musical shells of ears entered a stone forest and the skin of his face was secured with the blind dry buttons of eyes nothing was left him but touch what stories he told with his hands in the right he had romances in the left soldier’s memories they took my brother and carried him out of town he returns every fall slim and very quiet he does not want to come in he knocks at the window for me we walk together in the streets and he recites to me improbable tales touching my face with blind fingers of rain

All night the sound had come back again, and again falls this quiet, persistent rain. What am I to myself that must be remembered, insisted upon so often? Is it that never the ease, even the hardness, of rain falling will have for me something other than this, something not so insistent— am I to be locked in this final uneasiness. Love, if you love me, lie next to me. Be for me, like rain, the getting out of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi- lust of intentional indifference. Be wet with a decent happiness.