Through my half-opened window frames,
A single slice of night;
Dripping with moist despondence.
A bough of bougainvilleas
Tremblingly measures out
A violet minuet.
Echoes of rain linger
Like an inverted image,
In the leaves whispering to the night.
Tonight the city sleeps still,
Its dreams washed clean
Of the day's detritus
Perhaps beyond my framed view
The sky is turbid, sullen;
A brooding red
Like a muddied river
Dreaming of horizons once known,
Dotted with the white silence of mountains.
But I see only the flaking wall-yellow
Shivering leaf green, street-lamp white
And transparent silence.
Yet that red river in the sky
Murmurs of the terminals of all the hours
Where I've had my days stamped.
Again the sky begins to weep
Half-unheard rain music
Like Beethoven's Fifth Sonata.
Rain-music crawls, quietly, quietly;
Across my windowpanes
Into the pores of memory
And tells me that my days
Are now full of words
That have lost their etymologies.
