The Birth Of Rain
Drifting on a drab Sunday in Perth among the ashtrays and leftover sublimities of the church bells. My studio window above the rooftops a smear of willow and wet pine undulating gently in the stillness that followed the rain. Wolves on the easel, waiting to pay the rent. May of the fifth year into the twenty-first century, fifty-six, I sit in a blizzard of tobacco crumbs because I'm too poor to buy tailor-mades, coughing at the computer, wiping small drops of water like pygmy tears from the Cyclopean eye of the screen that glows with the same effulgence as the dirty sheet of the sky. The main migrations are over, but maybe these words are rosaries of late-returning birds. Two anthracite, boat-tailed grackles on a branch just beyond the grimy glass and a gust of sparrows chirrup like squeaky alternator-belts, manically elated in the wake of the storm that has just passed. My freedoms are more sober, my resurgencies probably less profound than the gray roses I give birth to here at my desk, waiting for one of these terminal urgencies of insight to sway me like a bell.
Maybe Louise later today with her Cola and cassettes, and her rough, voluptuous, laughing humanity scorning the random acids of the vulgar world that schools her, a muse who doesn't take requests, a generous longing that's been through a lot. So I sublimate the root-fires of my leafless batons into an auto-de-fe of white canes tired of trying to tap their way through a maze of sexual creeds, blind. The result? A novel and dozens of poems apples above the worms. And I keep her cats, Morgan and Rain, mother and kitten almost fully grown. There are no humans Louise loves more.
The kitten was born beside me on the couch at one-thirty in the morning while Louise was in the hospital and I read La Mettrie, d'Holbach, Diderot, d'Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau and Helvetius, eighteenth century French les philosophes. Two days ago, remembering, she asked me to write a poem to celebrate the birth. And it's two hundred and fifteen years since the French revolution went into convulsions and mothered daggers out of its wounds, and we are neither free, nor equal, nor brothers, and the birth of Rain, by association, is only the smallest of iota subscripts below the voluminous pretext of that slaughter, hardly, if at all, a mote that matters; but in a way she was born while the peasants stormed the Bastille, and time sent corpses and ideas floating facedown on one of its more famous rivers of blood all the way to the embryonic comma of this tender, contrary event. And there was honour in being a witness when Morgan jumped up beside me
and lay her head upon my right arm as a pillow, the great red text
with ivory pages open to the public like the Vatican before me
as the soft, gray satchel of her body shuddered with the natal lightning
of a different storm, the quickening eruptions of a different riddle
than the one that dropped its answer like a blade
on the necks of the cropped carnations as I kept on reading, thinking
to run for a towel before deciding not to disturb her,
that a little blood on the couch wouldn't hurt anything
compared to the streams of gore that caked the pages of my book.
And there was a humility in the act of watching, and a trust,
as if a great secret were demanding something of her
she was willing to go through hell to give. And my heart
laboured with her like a sympathetic strawberry, convinced of a miracle,
and even the colder lizards of my mind were awed
by the conception of the material immortality achieved
by the platitudinous genius of replicating genomes,
and who among temples and havens and research labs
could hold a candle to that, and what have I written, or felt, or thought,
that even comes close? And there wasn't a manger,
but the whole of the vast, star trailing night
crowded in behind the adoration of the angel-winged lamps to observe
genesis in the portent of its light
as Morgan rose like a violent squall
and squatting let slip with a howl of wounded passage
a black, sleek pickle of life wrapped in pink ribbons
tied to the tongue-sized kite of a pink placenta
with nothing left to say
while the French Revolution lay open on the table,
crazed with vertical caesarians. Two minutes more
and the afterbirth was eaten, Rain, because she's rippled, blind
because her eyes were queered by the living room light,
groomed and heading for the tit the way
a baby turtle waddles out of its cosmic egg with the world on its back to the sea,
her three-toed paws not yet the heavy seals of tigers,
and stumped by the impasse of continental plates
between the cushions, her first obstruction, tried, but insurmountable, I
appointed myself a force of nature as good as any
and gave her a boost to the bottle, Morgan,
a cat that seldom purrs, purring like dough
at having the cleat of her nipple kneaded into milk.
Two and a half hours I walked and waited to see if she would live;
window to window, through doors and back again, two and a half hours
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poem by Patrick White
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