Rather than trying to draw my surroundings, to capture this room by the lines that define and contain it, I will delimit it in clean bright words, set out the boundaries in nouns given room to exhale into their own airy spaces: shh, see: the transom window slanted open on a rainy garden, the low ceiling clothed in zebra striping, the loftbed on which I lie supine with a notebook upright on my chest, and this page across which a tangle of images seethes in the inky wake of my pen’s nib’s nip. Should I mention the music? Cobweb cello, piano sermons, synth tinsel, music that is a metaphor for itself; but it is a smokescreen concealing the evening, decking the breeze with gorgeous fatuities of pearlescent opaline. So off it must go … Now hear:
It is raining, and the rain is a language, the rain is an excited torrent of fluid speech that mounts in fury, subsides in flutters, spits, sputters. Through the crowding thousands of raindrops many watery sentences propagate, drop and drip, ploppy syntagms bouncing forth and back and rippling, fluming and sluicing, splash patterns lacing into point and counterpoint, rain riffs ranting, trailing off, fading into the background noise of their overwhelming, teeming, and anarchistic mass culture, every drop a handclap or a trumpet blast, an affirmation or negation, a wry breakfall or a comic splat, yes: but every drop has its own small say within the pluvial horde. Poised against this loquacious flood of wet language—and perched precariously below my windowsill—a squat red candle holds its own stubborn soliloquy, prosecuting a complex argument against the wind, laboring away at its heightened points without caring that neither I nor anyone else can interpret its flickering, desperate diatribes. The rain may be a chattering society of millions, in which each drop gets its plashing say in the instant it dies, but the candle is a patient eremite, a flame monk dialoguing with a local force it believes to be a god. See the candle’s wax cowl collapsing as it retreats down into the humble darkness of its last and inmost thoughts, conserving its materials as the wick burns down to zero, its speech going ragged only toward the end, plainchant fluttering as the flame beats like the wing of a moth of light which can’t fly anywhere, which flaps and bats and writhes against its own end. It dies—
And the rain goes wild! Exults, and baptizes the earth with its own name anew each second, anointing the night in the freeflowing joy of its scintillating communal polylogue. What’s more, agitated by this liquid prolixity, my window’s soft loose windscreen gibbers and slips, tatters and flips, curls and beckons and shivers; then, released from its furors, it settles like a diaphanous white eyelid over the garden scene, twitching in gentle REM sleep, shifting and palpitating as nocturnal forms funambulate underneath, as the night dreams, as the wind jumps and humps in like a living present that keeps unwrapping itself with a flourish, squiggling and wriggling in the ecstasy of its hereness, giving itself spendthriftly to my cheek, tracing aeolian letters on my veiny page of skin, scribbling its wind scripture on my stained-glass nerve ends: hark: three terpsichorean breezes conga-line in from distant climes, bearing gifts of insectsong and cat-murr; and to the east a star hangs where the king shall be born—but the king is just the night’s son, the dawn sun on the verge of coming, whose auroral corona will once more provide the radiance for his own daily coronation, this kind king sun who is also his own coruscating crown, wreathed with clouds and set on the alabaster brow of his mithril morning. The spring night always dreams of the king to come; it’s different in winter, when the vaulted nights are long graves, sepulchers where wight queens clutch shawls of ice and howl and weep of vanity, frost spiders seal the panes with ruffled ornament, and all is cold as church; but spring brings a spring, every raindrop pushes up a plantbud, every liquid tap on the soil twists another leaf open, and even old skully death has a seedling sprout through his eye, and the bees buzz their honey into my ears, and every swaying tree is an astonished green idea, and above the flood rises the holy pigeon of the Image, most maculate conception of Imagination and Language. In the beginning was the Garden, sans Adam and Eve and even God. In the end will be the Word.