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Rain arriving at roof's edge. Drip music, as Bach heard it, the largest possible assembly of sadness. Grave markers, every one.
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A drip on icicle spreads, and laves the whole of its found body descending: a mirror refreshed in cycles.
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"Water follows
a water leader"*
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The IV's small tube joins at isinglass: premature reliquary; solvent grace in trembling dash to vein.
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Prick's prequel a pool under skin, where a swelling swims in red -- as if the thorn frees the flower.
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I look up into squeeze bottle's tip: the definition of "sudden" prevailing over all plans for calm.
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Overheard: "He claims to be baptized, but it was just a sprinkle."
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Gelatinous tear depending at daffodil's cut stem: a vitreous humor that brings lapse of bright view in falling.
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Popsicle-melt meets elbow tip; dog's panting stops, then resumes.
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The elderly math teacher mops his bald head but not his nose, leaving a drop in dance-dangle. Students all intensely attentive, for once.
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"Selection tunes communities of cells to the phase transition between order and chaos where a power law distribution of damage avalanches on all scales propagate across the system."**
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Awakened: a tear in my left ear.
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The rain has stopped, but a slower version of it goes on for hours under trees: green memory.
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Bathtub, stoppered beneath the slowest of leaks, is filled by one night's deep sleep.
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One drop tips the tilted pot, but the one that did it rushes out lost like all the others.
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Interviewer: "Who was it, really, who swung the election?"
Pollster: "It was a woman in Nebraska."
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Drops on screen door wire are square.
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"Irrational Self Assembly: When a cold solid or a liquid surface comes in contact with moist air, moisture condenses on the surface, forming water droplets that grow with time to form patterns on the surface. Such phenomena [are] referred to as 'breath figures'. . . ."***
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A few drops over an earthen dam, and in an instant dark slabs are calving into the rushing bite. River;soldiers;laughter.Blame.
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In that place where my wife was because of depression, she sat through many days facing a white wall. Light bulged in through one pane in a window, its trembling half-orb growing through the day, there, on plaster. Then it slid quickly down to shadow. She said to me once, "Why is there more than one of them?" I made a few weak gestures and said, "Some things take time to unfold, to resolve. And in the course of things we arrive." She looked away. "But each is filled already," she said. "Past anything being added to it."
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A man on a city sidewalk pushes a shopping cart, its dimensions increased by the addition of plywood sides. It is filled with everything he has ever found and kept. He has stopped to face the diner's plate glass front, below a torn awning, and patrons inside are irritated that he stares. But he is looking at drops of water that are still collecting there, on the glass, fed by the fine and persistent mist of rain that has soaked him. He notices that distinct drops sometimes sag and join others -- then rush to include fellows until a coursing takes them down through time together. And some drops bulge and descend alone, seeming to find, by no plan, a path that weaves through all, alone. He looks on, as if at tea leaves in a pale cup, or knucklebones thrown. And then he moves on amid departing and arriving crowds.
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Notes:
*From W.S. Merwin's Asian Figures (Atheneum, 1980), which includes his translations and adaptations of many proverbs and aphorisms taken from anonymous Asian sources. The lines included here are from a section composed of Korean figures.
**Stuart A. Kauffman, Investigations (Oxford University Press, 2000). This quote appears in a section of the book in which the sand pile experiments of Per Bak are considered. In the experiments (or demonstrations) sand is dribbled onto a flat table until sand-slide avalanches begin to drop to the floor. A record of the size and distribution of these avalanches reveals a power law distribution, and a property of the system known as "self-organized criticality."
***Mohan Srinivasarao, Georgia Institute of Technology. From a colloquia & seminar series, Spring 2002, in which he delivered a talk entitled "Intriguing Issues in Soft Matter Physics: Irrational Self-Assembly and Anchoring Transitions in Liquid Crystals".
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