It is cold tonight, and the wind colder still, and the rain when it touches my skin feels as though it is on the verge of turning to ice, and taking me with it. Thoughts as dark as the moonless sky come, bidden by this chill and the hour. My kitchen window emits a pale light shaft that makes the surrounding night seem darker still, and the thought of the indoors' warmth it summons calls me to return, but something about the cold holds me.
It has my attention, like some wreck or disaster, or some road-killed creature stiff and silent on cold asphalt, being passed by by indifferent machines that wrench their occupants away toward the doomed commonplace: out of that brief moment when no-one is driving and back to where the illusion of control must again become no illusion, lest the roadside suffer another grim scene.
And so I concentrate on the sound of the rain, the soft thumps and louder splashes, and think of it soaking into the ground to feed the roots, and think of the growth that will come in spring whether I see it or not. After a while the rain does begin turning to ice, though not yet to snow, and the ground turns white. If I waited here in the cold long enough perhaps the sound of rain would cease and the silence of falling snow would replace it, but the whitening ground has broken the dark spell, and I return to the warmer house. But my fingers are still cold and clumsy as I type.
( Sunday Verse )
It has my attention, like some wreck or disaster, or some road-killed creature stiff and silent on cold asphalt, being passed by by indifferent machines that wrench their occupants away toward the doomed commonplace: out of that brief moment when no-one is driving and back to where the illusion of control must again become no illusion, lest the roadside suffer another grim scene.
And so I concentrate on the sound of the rain, the soft thumps and louder splashes, and think of it soaking into the ground to feed the roots, and think of the growth that will come in spring whether I see it or not. After a while the rain does begin turning to ice, though not yet to snow, and the ground turns white. If I waited here in the cold long enough perhaps the sound of rain would cease and the silence of falling snow would replace it, but the whitening ground has broken the dark spell, and I return to the warmer house. But my fingers are still cold and clumsy as I type.
( Sunday Verse )