Dark Matter

A good reason to stand in the rain
is so you can watch a bus driving away
for as long as it takes to disappear
and then if you like you can either go inside
or stand there a while longer, wondering
if it will by some strange reversal of your fortunes
and those of everyone on board
come back and restart all your lives
in dramatic or subtle ways
and forever after make the sensation 
of cold-soaked clothing clinging to your skin 
the greatest feeling you could ever imagine.

A good reason to stand in the rain
is when the air has gotten
so sharp inside that to breathe there
is to bleed there or to burn from within
so intensely that as the heat begins to dissolve you
from inside out you can look up openmouthed
into the dark nimbus above
and let the drowning of your pain commence 
as the downpour enters your core. 

A good reason to stand in the rain
is to feel something again
after you’ve been so numbed down 
by attempting to live in the light 
that thoughts of dawn and daylight
have come to mean nothing
and then you hear the water in the sky
coming for you and at last something
corresponds to the wild ocean
you’ve been holding within 
for fear of the shaking heads of those 
who just love you more when you’re on 
their dry and sunny shores. 

A good reason to stand in the rain
is how perfect you feel at last out there
even as the crowd inside waves at you
to get you to come in
and gestures with coats and umbrellas
to get you to come in 
and eventually turns their back on you
forgetting about even wanting you
to come in and be as warm and dry
as they are, even as the rain continues
uncaring for them while it bathes you
as you wish to be bathed,
as you have always wished to be bathed.

Don’t,
he said.

Don’t take hold of
this suffering,
this blanket of sorrow,
and pull it up over 
your shoulders
like a cape before you go out
to face the blue-gray world.

It’s heavy, has lead in its hem,
and if you fall off into
the deep water below us
I won’t be able
to pull you up and out.

No matter how I might try,
he said,

the cape
is too heavy;

you have always been a superhero
to me, we both know I am not
and have never been;

the water down there
is deep and cold and if you sink
away from me, I shall follow you
down to the bottom and together 
we’ll drown when there’s
no need for that, we’re not
superheroes;

heroics
won’t solve a thing here.
We just have to take care,
watch where we step.

We’ll be alright,

he said. 

Your living room couch
a blank hole.

Your affectless grin 
in the face of televised chatter.

Your bedeviled yard, filthy from
socialization you didn’t attend.

Half the community mourning
the departure of the sun,

half ecstatic in full plastic ghost worship
under the moon.

Your slow blinking apprehension
when you turn away from

this season of cooling and
finale; if ever there will be

rebirth, it seems mythically far off now,
a prophecy like any other:

affirmed only in retrospect,
long after you miss your chance

to prepare for it
and reap its joy when it comes.

You tell yourself there’s so much to do
before the snow, all those things

to be picked up and stowed 
before the first snow, before

the first snow. But
the living room couch is

a blank hole and there’s so much
chatter it’s hard to even think.

Instead you sit with the prophecies,
eyes shut tight, affectless grin in place.

Calling the lone white pine
in the neighbor’s yard 
white pine, but also calling it
lightning haired star;

naming the nightly skunks
Lucius, Stripe Priest, and
the Defiant One;

pleading with
the omnipresent sparrows
to step back from
the young cardinals 
on the old feeder. 

We pray on Wednesdays
to the garbage truck,
the recycling truck, call them  
thunder servants
carrying the worst of us away. 
(When there is actual thunder
we misunderstand and think it is
a train. We say, is that a train?
Where is it going, and why is it  
empty handed?)

In the suburbs or
the richer neighborhoods
call us desolate and poor 
if you must speak of us at all,
scorn us for living here
in our dense little enclaves.

We know better. Close as we are
to each other without knowing 
each other by name, but we know enough.
We call the neighbors
the slow walking people up the hill next door
or green house baby girl’s mom
or stay away from that one.

This morning Lucius 
was dead on the street. We 
call for the city workers 
to come pick him up before 
the day’s heat takes his scent
to new levels, although they
won’t come soon enough,
we know.

We watch as the father of 
the slow walking people up the hill next door
comes out with a shovel,
scrapes Lucius up from the pavement,
and puts him in the ground
at the base of the lightning haired star.

Stands there for a bit afterward, staring up,
leaning on the shovel.

Goes, slowly,
back into the house. 

Someone
has to stare back from the dark.

Someone
has to volunteer
to hold the keys.

Someone 
has to open the door and look in
now and then to check on
what’s in there.

Someone 
has to describe it for us
although the nature 
of what’s within is, allegedly, 
well known. 

Someone
has to be there 
in case someone else
stumbles into the dark
while the door is open
and can’t find their way out.

Someone
has to go to war
when now and then someone else
calls the dark terrible
and tries to pretend it’s not worthy
of consideration and suggests
we seal the door to it permanently.

Someone
has to become what’s within
and the keeper of what’s within
and the guide to what’s within
and the fortress of what’s within
and now and then the caretaker of those within
when someone else needs to stay there
and make a forever home in the dark.

To think that all this
could be described as
what happens when
a stoned guitarist
plugs in every pedal available
stomps them all at once
and starts banging away
to create such glorious mud
that no one can hear 
a song within this 
so they invent one 
like a boat on a sea of meaning
waiting to be brought to shore
and toward that end we stand around
looking for the Player so we can ask
for this profundity to be opened
and plumbed in public and help us 
see the revelation therein
when in fact the meaning of it all
is that a stoned guitarist 
just wanted to see
what happens
when everything
happens at once
in a bleeding cacophony and the illusion
of this being a song 
is one imposed by those
hungry for the sound of
one clean line
buried under all
a boat seeking port
while a good old jazz standard
or ancient folk tune plays
somewhere under the storm
but in truth the guitarist
has struck one last blast chord
and walked away
across the water 
to find another place 
to play while
the crude wash of sustain
hangs on and on
and the feedback
is killing us

Inside a box
where I am fated
to punch the walls

for this lifetime.
I can’t see through the walls I punch
because they’re walls

and I’m weak; been punching
so long and the holes I’ve made
look small. Like mouse holes

from old cartoons. Inside
the holes mice lived
comfortable lives till

they went outside
but then again
what was out there

was spacious and they had
plenty of room to run
from death by cat.

Outside these walls are more walls
I won’t punch through
in this lifetime, I’d bet.

I’m too weak to run
from anything if I did
break through. So

back to punching
weakly at the walls
before the walls. 

It’s all I know
of all there is. 
I’m no mouse;

there’s so little
in here
that comforts me. 

There must be secret behavior
in the world of whales;
it cannot be otherwise; 
traditions they carry on
that we either do not see
or do not understand
when we do see them;

perhaps a convention they follow
when they begin an ancient song,
similar to saying, “once
upon a time;” a convention that does not
shift from bowhead to gray to humpback;

do they all slow and stop
wherever they are in any ocean
upon hearing it, as if it were
a supplication to those who knew of
Better Times?

Think of whales praying 
somewhere beyond the discernment
of humans. Other beings
suspending themselves in the deep
nearby, hoping the coming grace
will envelope them as well,

holding them
in a place we cannot see
or know.

I  cannot describe
the sound of rain
without referring to rain.
So I can tell you nothing
about the sound of rain 
you don’t already know
except that to me,
rain sounds 
like Friday night
any time or day I hear it.
Rain feels like a prelude
to something expected,
centered and endless,
might be cleansing,
might be flooding,
might never end or
might depart leaving brightness
behind. But what it
sounds like? It sounds like
rain. Like the smell
of how a week ends 
and another begins, even though
there is nothing primeval
about weeks or weekends.
We made those up long after
we learned to recognize
the sound of rain. We made
a lot of things up
once we couldn’t be bothered
to listen, really listen,
to the rain.