After the Third Book of Rain


After the first book they said the desert was even drier than before,
that the turtles had confused the dunes for clouds
and trudged like stick figures through the broken straw,
that the prairie dogs had pissed sand on the reeking eucalyptus,
that saguaro cactuses had screamed, sprouted buzzards
from their fleshy stalks,
that even the mirages had spit blood red buckshot along
the flaky banks of the mottled river.

After the second book, the winds went on strike and the air
would not even hold a feather, let alone a jet or hippopotamus,
so that many things sank beneath the boiling webs of creosote.
It was so quiet then that tongues of bells grew coated
with hours of plaque and gleamed like brown teeth
from the faces of belfries along El Camino Real.

After the third book things grew even better, turned upside down,
when everything that was left fell upward into the void.
(That is where everything belonged after all.) One might say
the equilibrium had been disturbed, a very natural state of affairs too,
if one looks under scrambled bed sheets of defrosted lovers,
or down into the eye of your lover when she focuses into
the ceiling mirror behind you, and you see yourself
falling up into a darkening sky as the rain comes down.

from Tears In The Fence, Dorset, U.K. 1996.