The Rain Tonight
The rain tonight
a gentle carillon of afterthought
pensively lingering like eyes in the window.
The town unusually quiet
even for two a.m.
Asphalt with the albido of a wet rat snake
or a black bull
and blades of garish light
thrust through its back
like the swords of the streetlamp matadors
poised over its haemorrhaging
like solar daffodils
about to deliver the coup de grace
to the new moon.
The farmlands and the pot patches flourish.
Everything's wearing the mirror of everything else
like skin
and the leaves
pour their hearts out
like spouts without pitchers.
Black beads of rain
falling from the rim of my gangster hat
I might look like a gun
but inside
I feel like a boy
who just shot a bird with a slingshot.
All my life I've carried the bloodguilt
of someone else's crime
without knowing
what was done to whom and why.
It's as if I have always lived
through six decades of this strange life
like a child
trying to make up
for something I didn't do.
If my mother was the Virgin Mary
my father was
forty days alone in the wilderness
of a Vancouver Island logging camp
with the devil.
I never used to think
the sins of the father
were visited upon the sons
because it seems so savagely unfair
to damage their innocence by mere association.
Stalin McCarthy and Paul Pott come to mind
and if this is the work of God
then he's got spiritual rabies
and we've all been bit.
And I've wondered as well
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poem by Patrick White
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