ManicDDaily

Shaking Loose Retained Rain (Zuihitsu)

Eyelids leaves after rain, pale and thinly-veined; overhead, translucent green outlined by opaque damp; my brother calls about his own veins as I walk, hard spots clotting legs after an operation.  And, so, I think, we fail.

Caisson, draped in flag, troops through me as he speaks, lashed curb of long ago November ’63, Washington, D.C., the lone stallion backward-booted stirring reins; what we had been as a people days before.

As a harder percussion begins again–wind shaking loose retained rain, unswaddling the clinging downpour–the pain behind my eyes descends my inner face for no root cause that I can name, other than the fact that life stops short (or long.)

Sure, I’ve known it, like the day’s weather mapped out in advance, but now, as tree limbs sway like upturned skirts, I lie beneath some unknown piano (grand), where a delicately slippered foot, its arch curved like a closed eyelid, periodically pumps the pedal by my head, and, as I hope in that thick of that dust and wood that, if I stay quiet enough, I’ll be allowed to stay up late, I catch the scent of the woman’s hose, a delirium of nylon as seductive as glue, gasoline, a cedar drawer tinged with secret lingerie, blurred together in a child’s mind like raw batter, illicit in a great glass bowl.

One thistle highlights the field, a softly feathered burst of mauve belying thorn; the wind dying now so that raindrops quiet, barely fingering a distant scale.

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I worked on the above draft prose poem for Kerry O’Connor’s Wednesday Challenge as part With Real Toads (poetry site.)  The challenge was to write something like a Zuihitsu, which is a Japanese form based on the idea of a “following brush.”  (Read Kerry’s description for more information.)  For those who follow this blog, this prose poem was the underpinning for a much shorter poem I wrote this past weekend  called Feuille. (Reason for some of the overlap.)  This weekend, I was trying to really shorten everything.  But the Zuihitsu seemed to allow for the digressions of the original piece.  (More or less.)  I’ve edited a fair amount since first posting. 

The poem is supposed to describe a moment after the rain has pretty much stopped, but I could not resist, in these drought-ridden days, posting a short video of a the rain that came before that stopping.