RAIN HALO

. . . . .


I woke up this morning in a cloud. My sleep was still receding like a stone into the bottom of a pond, the planet falling became a seed. . . The birds chipped away at it and then, just before I was fully out of its atomic pull, the sky fell through its middle, torn violently by a purple scar, the scar shocked--disappearing.

I'm captive in my room by the broken cages of the rain, all the pouring of the light into these lucent explosions. A cool electrocution. We need the rain so badly here in Southern California, and I think I need the day to work.

I prefer the stormy prison to the light one. I think of Jean Genet in his childhood prison of Fontevrault, a prison without fences, a blue autumn surrounded by dark hedges that seemed to glow like an evil halo over his life: "A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness."

I remember another rainstorm early spring, some years ago when I was living in Tempe, AZ, and missed my friend:
a small poem to my friend Cody Lee Cloud:

CLOUD

The rain is soft as script. I can feel it
inside. Opening
the door to the street--it's
a hail of silver stones, even louder,
everlasting--a crisp
apple split apart. Can't you hear me,

Cody? Shouting your name across the Light?
The seeds dark as letters
trailing my fingers with their luminous oil.
Smell the clean world of petals
shocked to bliss by each
little barb of the mirrors! O Spirit,

I taste like pinecone. It hurts to
feel good as a blossom disrobed
but I do
give myself to all
little sumptuous mouths.
I take off my shirt

to search for you. I drink the blue halo of these tears.

. . . . .