Rain Sheets

Woke me up. Hot tin roof. Cats. I'd fought the duvet to a draw anyway, needed to pee, and the rain was playing Coltrane loud and clear. Can't stay in bed when that happens, one in a million, like those monkeys with the typewriters. Power had failed, sometime, and the one clock was flashing. Had to boot up, to get the time. I'm privy to several layers of private jokes, it comes with the territory, waking Grimnir from his slumber was an added bonus. A belly laugh, is what it was. Tears down my cheek watching Slothrop tango. Punctuating the false dawn, and the spatter, as jazz morphs to Bach. Sonorous drops. They must be larger, or maybe it's a question of velocity, but that doesn't seem right, gravity being what it is. Consider the newts in the field. Nice tail. She's got to know, when she waves it like that. We share a passion for Norse Mythology. Something Starbuck. Wait, I can find it, it's posted on my wall. This is why God invented flashlights, so I can search my walls. The information there! But mostly in a language I translate badly. I find it, a semi-flattened wad of paper that says FEET IN HERE, and I know what it means, because I work next to a furniture store where they do some assembly. There, at the end, it's a lot like Beckett, you notice that? Thanks to Diana I have an actual rubbing of Emily's tombstone, it's at the framers now. I don't have a place to hang it, which means I'm going to shuffle art at the house. That Faulkner poster, for the Yoknapatawpha Conference, will have to move, which posits a whole domino effect. Listen, my scars are mostly hidden, each of us carries a burden, whether on your sleeve or not. The price we pay for living. Shit accumulates, and soon all the flat surfaces are covered, you can't park a car in the garage, and the garden shed is bursting with free samples. Loki is a lot like Coyote, if I read Levi-Strauss correctly, and that salamander's ass, well, what can I say? Made me realize I wasn't dead. Raining hard now. End of the world hard. I know this drainage, and there is no place for the water to go. We call this flooding and the only question is how deep. I don't have an answer, only projections. What they say. I'm OK, because I live on a ridge. High ground, easily defendable, I have a potato canon. Secure in my position. Everyone knows I'm loony. Whatever I say is suspect. Therefore. Sheets of rain, dancing across the roof, nothing, really, but an imagined pattern. Just sounded like a banjo I'd heard once, Bela, in Telluride.