Bruce McRae
The Storm of the Century
It was raining old women and walking sticks,
chair legs, rope, wheelbarrows.
It was raining husbands and jugs and knob berries,
teeming sad and broken umbrellas,
Jupiter Pluvius in a temper,
the thrice-plowed fields awash,
the rainmaker sleeping easily.
One of those rains that wants to linger,
with nowhere better else to go.
A smutty downfall draping a variated horizon,
falling like Carthage under Rome’s thrall,
Saturnian winds railing against inequities,
scouring the planet to the pith and marrow.
A rain so heavy men stop to reconnoitre the soul,
its lumen, its joules, its watery constitution.
When women counsel their children’s dreams,
the damned considering self-murder.
The storm of the century, and the next as well,
dogs shuddering against cornerstones,
bells in towers tolling in shaken accord,
rivers overflowing with blood-red malevolence.
And me, in a bed not unlike Queequeg’s coffin,
the last little Caesar, floundering in the heart-deep dark.
A cypher in a room of cans and buttons.
Having made a drought of his own contention.
Other work by Bruce McRae