Awaiting Rain

(for Preston Mark Stone who, in our Usenet days, kept encouraging me to keep writing)

Clouds stingy with rain gather over the restless city.
The monsoon is nearly upon us,
But not quite. The weather is a terrible
Tease, the odd drumbeats of thunder signifying
Nothing, yet. For an interminable while,
We are hostages to this pregnant gunmetal sky.

More than grasses have died,
Where there was no shade or where
There has spread an unintended fire.
Dry throats plague all travelers;
The roads need their dust tamped down.
The northern winds are late in coming, but
They can banish the still air that imprisons us
And this parched country. We quiver
With impatience, waiting
For the wash of water.

How reluctantly rain falls,
Flashing us now and then
With a lightning sneer,
As if we owed a debt to heaven
Impossible to repay.

We need the rising smell of
Moistened earth to call out the cicadas,
Whose song is the sound
Of the monsoon announcing that
A cool twilight has finally come.

25 May 2005

Copyright Pomona Caccam. All rights reserved.

Personal Geographic

Joy that was, the time
When I was blind, and blinded
Times over to all that warning senses
And the known world's boundaries
Had ever taught, that plain sight
Never could, completely.
And so I embarked to diligently map
The rough terrain of your
Uncharted country.

I had fallen and drowned, and was
Wrapped in the winding sheet of
Love which was a kind of death
From all life's tiresome etiquette,
Yet was reborn for a time
To walk in beauty and in music,
In the book for whose pages
We continually hungered.

I can never travel there again,
Where once we walked invisible
Among the real lives of others, though
Time and its easy way of
Erasing the paths of previous explorations
Reluctantly allows me every
Ghost of you.

It is another life to which I have
Awakened. The protocols of duty,
Their continuance, now consume me,
What was left of the fires
Even we could not extinguish.

After taking stock of all
My memory's possessions,
I grant the braille of your lips to be
The most indelible, having read them
Repeatedly, then, with all
My exposed and secret skins.

23 January 1995

Copyright Pomona Caccam. All rights reserved.