Midway through ten days of the most profound
Recognition, I had on the fifth a daunting revelation.
It merged as I, sate on my porch and merely viewing,
Noticed the most consistent stream, bleeding my walk
Whilst going, soundlessly, atop the culvert and dallying
Not so much as two seconds’ fold as it entered and masked;
After so arousing on the adjacent form of the street, willing
Dauntlessly amongst the weeds. Its design became dispersed
And definition aloof. – But still, seven yards behind its tail
Endeavored, relentlessly and imperturbably,
Unto the walk and each particle’s division merely trudging
To the same, monotonous end, the same stream that it had come.
That it would keep on flowing! ‘Twas then I sought
A brief conception so true I had to part indoors
And camp upon a pen and pad – as was the intricacy
Of the whale inside my mind. I hollered for my dear
To hold my calls, were there any, and disperse them for
Another time. – Hence committed, I hurried to
The whitest and most rudimentary description of a notion
So spawned its spore hath fled thus far for me to now indite
On a date truly later than that last, permissible initiation.
Of what its content stood concerned a stream, so alike
The body fleeing before my eyes, I named it D’Aujourd’hui:
Not sooner had I set it down, my paper overflowed
And the ink I had seemed smaller, or much too large for me,
A lonely personage, on a raining day, to muster. So I drew,
As well as I could, the illustration penned below, and have worked,
Countlessly, on its insatiable revision. It began so meek enough,
Its lack nearly set me on the conclusion I was incapable
Of enticing such a masterful beast. But I began:
“And ‘tis like puddles, each drop besetting the sky and felled
By the wind crawling this Earth in mortal consolation. So ‘tis,
But as is when one, the prior disk to dust the ground,
Bases the rest as the monster of a stream. – Both the second and first
Befall and merge – both coincide, whilst the third lands feet away,
And being separate entirely bestows no apt concentration
On the neighbor three arms apart. Now saying, as four descends
And brushes three, the two become relatively acquainted,
And a minute line happens ‘twixt the duo,
Adhering the separate entities. Minutes die and several
Multiply to twenty, so soon the white ground loosens
To a supple and darkened path, bulging with lives, piled
And grinding against the other, befriending each neighboring dot
With joy or abhorrence. – Which little matters; as is, they merged inevitably,
Like genes, passing some one they hold into the day of another,
Whether the receptor be pleased or hurt by the newest presentation.
Five minutes, six minutes, seven, eight and twenty –
The raining piles, bulges and merges, sharing its thoughts
And its tears and its dirges; piling up and is soon complete;
But cannot be so, as time in time will carry it on,
Oping the passage to several more minutes every time the rains decrease.
Halfway through the pour a session, set aside for our confession,
Brings amongst it two diseases, and the running river seizes
Them like cookies, poisoned Muses, eating them
Afore their use is used. These like alien data merging
In the pull of water purging, stripping of their heads and laughing,
Polar north and south forsaking, plagued themselves, and they then churning,
Sunk into the river’s frame. The storm awakes and on the waters
Blood besets and membrane matters, sunk into the paltry surface,
Wash apart until the clear blue of white again decrees.
The river waxes. Two heats aside the plagues descend the mourning sky,
And frying the lonely dots not yet inside the running waist,
Dig into the bulging water, seeking at its please a purpose,
So malign the plagues forget whose master was their surface. –
Two stalks inflame atop the moving, rushing, constant waters,
Trying at their best to burn the capabilities they hark, but,
In touching liquid vanish, leaving just as vainly as they came.
The water is unscathed, and time therein a constancy.
Several minutes leave, bringing ere the seven thousand single drops
A piece of sky neglected. The river’s moving faster, faster,
Stronger, braver, sewing seams not one or tripled twice could ever
Sew apart in twenty days – for bringing twenty comes a million
Lives dispersed inside the river, taking walks inside the ever
Waiting, moving, intercession.”
Penning thus far, I made to make a curious note my times had passed
And quite forgotten hitherto. ‘Twas the simplest biological frequency,
And impurely astounding to my words. The fact in question was that,
Cells, every cell in the human organism, reacts, creating heat.
This unquestionable and inutile heat is released in the body,
Left to dance desultory on a ballroom floor however empty, still stayed
By a bored few depicted by little form nor any definable melody.
Thus being, fire inside the human host is absorbed, and by none other
Than rain itself. Its capacities, of whose specifics I’ve quite forgotten,
Allow its consumption to favor such heat, thereon keeping the host
From burning alive. How truly and utterly sound! I thought,
That something useless, purposeless, should eat itself inside its own,
And form! What true and impartial hymns these be.
          Just then, by my impartial absence, the paper of my words betook
Onto the raging storm of wind and gloating my astonishment,
Wrung itself into the river, swept away forever.
Current paranoia crazed me as my dear entreated in,
I come and have a bite to eat. – But, even knowing it was hopeless,
I stood and chased unto the purpose of finding
A note in a pit of raging tears. Into the walk and past the fence,
I grew, running, sliding, slipping, tripping on the sky’s encrypting Note of warning I shall fall! but chasing after several floating
Glimpses on the wall’s bemoaning,
I sat inside the street and closed my eyes to see the sky.
Droplets dancing on my nose, cavorting to my tongue and chest
And hands and feet and down my spine, chased me,
While patting slowly
On the growing, slowing D’Aujourd’hui.