Rain
(after Edward Thomas, after a fashion)
The rain, tonight, so long past dusk, the wild sibling
rain of its more quizzical kin that fell today so haltingly
in all sorts of light and weather: now stintingly in shadow,
now noachian and turned tawny by the sun,
now stintingly again on the ragged valley,
the burnweed, the privet, the lantana—names
I know only because I ask my phone to teach me
the circumference of the world in the house’s lee:
agapanthus, African lilies, a spear or two
of Doryanthes, more seas of burnweed
& the brown detritus of expired jacaranda pressed
down deep into the pores of the macadam, this rain
seems finally to have stilled—the gazebo experiment
entirely a failure, the old house too soon
sent down its river to its sawmills, and I,
having fried my medicine in the wayback
of the Avensis in Port Macquarie, camp
entirely uneasy in my own skin, bucked off
by my heart’s tremolo, by the uncanniness
of snapping back again to the wide valley of the window,
the green and furred abyss that gapes
between the brotherly blur and tumult of the lounge
and the still strangeness of our being
that I can name only when it wakens me
from this waking.
• • •
Chris Vasantkumar is a professional anthropologist and an amateur misanthrope. Raised in rural Central Pennsylvania, he now lives in Sydney, Australia, with his partner and two sons. His academic work has appeared in numerous scholarly journals.