Large-eyed as an embryo, hard-boiled (sort of),
Raymond Chandler’s haiku-prone second cousin
twice removed, I don’t mind the rain. The rain
sounds like a bony old uncle blown in from Borneo
to do a softshoe on the roof, wanting
a cup of tea, a story. And the black ink voice
in the book I’m reading seems the voice of my
most ungenerous self, industrious but pipsqueak. It
almost dissuades me from the rain, the shoes
shined as for a funeral; I mean the sheen of art
life everywhere, furtively, begets (that is, fashions,
trends, jadedness), also the green-begetting
wet helterskeltering in rivulets, in
fan-shaped rills, in hands. Sheen
shore mezmers me. Lulls like these, the black ink voice
blurs to black ants, rank and file in disarray, haywire,
devoid of crumbs to Hercules up, of hidey
holes, of meanings. Their kind, my love, cannot get in.