The Sun Shower

"...Miracles occur
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles."
—Sylvia Plath


Down the street
a sunday of empty parks.

I watch myself
slide by
mirrors and shop windows.

Clouds assemble, grey
stones in a wall. All morning
the light has been thickening
toward rain. Now
the river's blown
ripple-patterns
grow suddenly still
and it begins, drowsy
as hemlock, a chill
drizzle that packs me in-
to a doorway's upright box.

Spidery limbs crawl
over the blank numbered faces
of clocks behind my face
which hangs, a ghost
about to evaporate
in the glass
between this universe
of concealed springs,
gears that whirr with insect speech
and a town wiped out by rain.

Inklings breathe
at the back of my mind
like the unshelled bodies of snails
and there's a shift
from the mouse-light of self-hypnosis
to long spattering bursts
of relief. The overcast
breaks up like an ice field in April
and wherever sunlight lights the bouncing rain
on the sleek tar, on the rinsed roofs
and hoods and bumpers of cars
even on flat water
it surprises thousands
of horned creatures the colour of glass
whose looked-through lives become visible
only when they have something to dance about.

 

© George Amabile