In broad daylight it starts to get dark with breathless 
speed, and a cumulus cloak grows into an uneasy 
fur coat off some astral back. An acacia, under the pressure 
of rain, becomes too noisy.
Neither thread nor needle, but something to do with sewing, 
almost Singer-made, mixed with a rusty cistern’s 
spurt, is heard in this chirr, and a geranium bares the sinewed 
vertebrae of a seamstress.

How familial is the rustling of rain! how well it darns and stitches 
rents in a worn-out landscape, be that a pasture, 
alleyway, puddles, tree-intervals—to foil one’s eyesight, which 
is capable of departure 
from its range. Rain! vehicle of nearsightedness, 
a scribe without his cell, greedy for Lenten fare, 
mottling the loamy parchment with his cuneiform brand of silence, 
with his smallpox care.

To turn away from the window! to behold a greatcoat with epaulets 
on the brown varnished rack, a red fox on the chair, neglected, 
the fringe of a yellow cloth which, having mastered the shibboleths 
of gravity, has resurrected 
itself and covered the table where late at night, a threesome, 
we sit for supper, and you say in your drowsy, quiet
—almost my own but muted by years’ fast distance—
baritone. What a climate.