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1
We trace the half-life
of rain on the window,
this affinity of water for glass,
like a hunger for a harder self,
soul brothers in transparency.
2
Rain falls inside its own reticence;
it falls through the hospitable
vacancy of air;
we hear it on the rooftops
and the trees:
tapping along the slick surface
of the leaves
like a blind man's stick.
3
Birds hunker
under the wet, slate-green wings
of the pine,
feathers disheveled into downy warmth,
waiting out the weather
inside the weather of trees.
4
We have built out house
too tight.
Leaks form in the life of denial:
walls abut walls; the roof cants
down to the gutters,
gutters to drain,
each connection, a fault-line,
waiting for water.
5
The rain gauge
doesn't measure rainfall,
only water caged inside a tube
of calibrated glass,
while outside, it rises and falls
through the permeable air,
this window's imperfect membrane,
the segregating cells, the skin,
the body made up mostly
of water.
6
I want to know how rain sounds
by itself.
Not rain hitting wind or walls or sidewalks,
but the sound of its freefall,
lines lenghtening in air,
the way sleepers
range along side each other,
their dreams dropping softly
into the fluid absence
where their bodies lie,
their breath inside each other's breath,
sibilant, insistent,
as rain falling with rain.
First published in Encore. Copyright © Jeanne Wagner
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