It rained all night,
turning windows into water features
and water features into windows
onto the nature of water.
But this was largely a futile display
because most people weren’t awake to reflect on it.
I, however, stood at my bedroom window
at two in the morning
and still at four,
curtains pulled back,
all the house lights off,
contemplating the fact that,
of all the kinds of precipitation,
rain is my favourite.
I prefer its honest simplicity
over the self-conscious show-offiness of snow
and its steady benign fall (on the just and the unjust)
over the melodramatic violence of hail
or the indecisiveness and evasiveness of fog.
It rained until well after dawn
gave the colours back to things
but in muted pastel water-colours
and bled their edges into the backdrops.
It rained when people kicked back their blankets
and cooked and ate breakfasts, washed and got dressed,
and started cars to carry them to fluorescent offices
on streets that seemed torrential black rivers.
It rained when playgrounds filled
with kids and growing puddles
around footprints and swingsets,
and dustbins became stews
of yesterday’s cast-offs:
candy wrappers, apple cores and disintegrating bread.
It rained a little softer when
I had my second cup of coffee
while I sat at the kitchen table
reading about ‘that heavy greenness fostered by water’
in a John Montague poem,
but submergence was far from my mind –
as were buckets and unpicked berries.
It didn’t rain at all later that morning
when I lay prone in my patch of wet grass,
in the backgarden,
watching the cloud cover unravel,
and rearranging thoughts:
A creature largely made of water
contemplating water,
while it soaked through my clothes –
fallen rain reaching up this time
at me, its reflection-made-flesh.
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