Sprinkle, sprinkle.

Tonight, the moon was hidden in gathering clouds, fading to a faint glow, then vanishing in darkness. Now drops of rain are falling, the first since spring. At the end of the block, I hear the sprinkler system of the apple orchard making another rain. The scent extracted from grass and tree and pavement by the first raindrops fills the night and evokes thoughts of distant streets on other nights when I walked rainslick sidewalks through silent city streets, past dark windows of rooms drowned in that sleep which eluded me. Sleep eludes me, still, in this mountain town. It is my lot to be the watcher of the world while others dream. Perhaps the silence is my dreaming, standing in the night with the fresh raindrops on my face.

Sleeping through disaster

Reading through my friends pages, I see that the last entry not about Pearl Harbor II was my own, from just before 5:00 AM today. How out of place it looks! I haven't turned on the televison yet. I'm as worried about what kind of reaction we're going to get from W as I am about further terrorist attacks. Part of me just wants to see some fanatics hung up by their tiny balls, but my more rational self realizes that if we don't respond with accuracy, we are simply spreading the terror. Find out who actually planned this, and then no mercy!

Tuesday evening.

On the Marginal Way
by Richard Wilbur


Another cove of shale,
But the beach here is rubbled with strange rock
That is sleek, fluent, and taffy-pale.
I stare, reminded with a little shock
How, by a shore in Spain, George Borrow saw
A hundred women basking in the raw.

They must have looked like this,
That catch of bodies on the sand, that strew
Of rondure, crease, and orifice,
Lap, flank, and knee - a too abundant view
Which, though he'd had the lenses of a fly
Could not have waked desire in Borrow's eye.

Has the light altered now?
The rocks flush rose and have the melting shape
Of bodies fallen anyhow.
It is a Gericault of blood and rape,
Some desert town despoiled, some caravn
Pillaged, its people murdered to a man,

And those who murdered them
Galloping off, a rumpling line of dust
Like the wave's white, withdrawing hem.
But now the vision of a colder lust
Clears, as the wind goes chill and all is greyed
By a swift cloud that drags a carrion shade.

If these are bodies still,
Theirs is a death too dead to look asleep,
Like that of Aushwitz' final kill,
Poor slaty flesh abandoned in a heap
And then, like sea-rocks buried by a wave,
Bulldozed at last into a common grave.

It is not tricks of sense
But the time's fright within me which distracts
Least fancies into violence
And makes my thoughts take refuge in the facts,
As now it does, remembering how the bed
Of layered rock two miles above my head

Hove ages up and broke
Soundless asunder, when the shrinking skin
Of Earth, blacked out by steam and smoke,
Gave passage to the muddled fire within,
Its crannies flooding with a sweat of quartz,
And lathered magmas out of deep retorts

Welled up, as here, to fill
With tumbled rockmeal, stone-fume, lithic spray,
The dike's brief chasm and the sill.
Weathered until the sixth and human day
By sanding winds and water, scuffed and brayed
By the slow glacier's heel, these forms were made

That now recline and burn
Comely as Eve and Adam, near a sea
Transfigured by the sun's return.
And now three girls lie golden in the lee
Of a great arm or thigh, and are as young
As the bright boulders that they lie among.

Though, high above the shore
On someone's porch, spread wings of newsprint flap
The tidings of some dirty war,
It is a perfect day: the waters clap
their hands and kindle, and the gull in flight
Loses himself at moments, white in white,

And like a breaking thought
Joy for a moment floods into the mind,
Blurting that all things shall be brought
To the full state and stature of their kind,
By what has found the manhood of this stone.
May that vast motive wash and wash our own.