THE RAIN MAKES THE NIGHT LOOK BLACKER The rain makes the night look blacker. Wet anthracite. Panthers and lacquer. Slash of the storelights in efflorescent water gardens that fountain and gutter with every passing car. A poor man’s Alhambra. A mistake to drive the Muslims and Moriscos out of Spain like poets you’d been plagiarizing to give Platonic court to unattainable, wealthy patrons you adored because they could afford it. Not much of a troubadour if your heart hasn’t got a voice of its own. Or your lute’s a guitar with a broken neck. Or is it an origami swan? Lamp-posts reflected in the double pane thermal windows like deep sky objects in the narrowing field of view as if someone threw a spear in the eye of the Hubble telescope in the time-honoured tradition of what to do if you meet a Cyclops in orbit and you’ve just jettisoned the third stage of the rocket you’re tied to. Got to be a church around here somewhere like a Neptunian shepherd moon fish farming. God’s a wild salmon full of eggs. Fingerlings of the traffic lights streaking their colours clean as dawn. You can muzzle science like a dancing bear in a political circus, but you can’t stop the dharma of the disease when people aren’t free to move around mentally at ease with their unlikely similitudes. There’s a lady singing up the street at a bar a friend of mine owned before he killed himself and left the rest of us to wonder how sad it can get, and she really belts like factory on the graveyard shift. Her voice seems to carry further in the wet than the wind on Fridays trying to teach dry leaves on a brittle day to sing the blues. Not missing anyone tonight. Not even who I was yesterday anymore than I will this idle delusion trying to track fish upstream while everything’s flowing the other way, and the small rain down can rain. Not callous, indifferent, or aloof. Alone. Though solitude’s not much to write home about. It’s still perilous for me. I’d say the point it makes is elusive if it ever flashed me a sign I wasn’t living in a medieval guildhall for stone masons who died a hundred and fifty years ago devoting their skills and their lives to permanence for the rich. And a canal to keep Kingston supplied. And a lodge to go occult in before you died. Something else the west stole from the Arabs like a secret Mechanic’s Illustrated to symbols. I believe in live and let live. It’s all water anyway, whatever way you flavour it to make it more palatable to the life that wastes it. The rain is a spider with the briefest of webs. Water music sweet enough to bring tears to your eyes in a glass palace of home-made harpsichords and self-styled mirrors at the end of October. A good rain that washes out the road. Not drizzle to keep the dust down. A flood myth not the eye of blood that spiritualizes the post mortem of the rose. PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 13:51:20 +0000
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