Its raining in Syracuse, New York—a warm rain for late October, as if it arrived from Carolina by mistake. The world smells like dying leaves and smoky earth. Its a good day for anonymous lovers—we can at last see beauty in strangers across the rainy parking lots.
Yes, Whitman, I hear you in a moist half dream.
We are two fishes swimming in the sea together,
We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes
mornings and evenings…
If you’re happy in rain you’re not fooled.
The political world—one kind of world—wants to dry me out.
Rain was always first. I remember the rains of boyhood. Alone in my grandmother’s Victorian ramshackle house…blind kid at a window. The house with its decidedly 19th century odors made manifest by rain…antimacassar of the dead…cedar wood boxes exhaling…I was lonely and thrilled.
I suspected early that rain was understandable by other means.
After a long life I wake up in rain guessing and guess.
This is the life I always wanted.
Planet of the Blind 