Issue 3: Lex Runciman

Two Day Rain

This our river began

as black night, dust, gravity, cold, and distance:

it began as time unconscious of itself

and atoms clustered for company –

beyond telling how much later, it began

in immeasurable heat, and by a mechanism

or serendipity it can no more explain

than recreate, elements became water,

and earth a place rounded under blue.

Thus from this our sky water makes fear,

anger, gratitude, violence, regret and love,

skepticism, irony, unwillingness and distrust.

It makes eyelashes and shoulders, elbows,

hamstrings, nipples, toes and tongues,

wheat, and every sequoia, newt, violin,

salmon, foxglove and wing.

All that water has seen and done it says

as it eddies and turns, pools and is by wind

shoved, as it becomes cloud again,

as for two days it has fallen sideways, loud,

then merely down.  Just this morning

I watched seven-year-old David next door

as he splashed in slick boots and fished worms

out of standing water.  When it rained harder,

he looked up and opened his mouth.

--Lex Runciman

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