When wasn’t rain, if I am not fooled
when was? So the rain cannot be seen

nor does it rain outside me, nor does it rain
inside me, if there is raining seen. It is thus

but no it rains, no thus for an it to be. Steady
in darkness soundless sound of rain wet

that is to hear without hearing heard
or simply speaking now as rain becoming

Somewhere you are out walking in that
careful loneness
as water beneath the many necks of trees,
a lamp enshrouded.

No communion exists between us
or anything. It is around this
that fear has wrapped
its teaching. I know you are listening

itself, the owl in the woody night, that sudden
when address is sincerity
and it does not matter how we say you or I.

I am the kiss,
what is done without being done
and only.

At night I dream as us about the dust.
The people who emerge from it
heat rippling across the surface of a lake
pass out of and into the whiteness, everywhere.
The white dust that takes the moisture from our skin
and in the fog-like wind roves as clouds
wandering the landscape
the bristles of many silent brooms.
We wait its passing through us, we are not
swept away. Nothing comes as no surprise:
the ships that flame out, sailing across the surface
of this lake of dust, slowly turning wheels
disappearing in the thumping of the night.
Nowhere feels freer than this. Even the smoke
smiles around its own coiling away.
If you move out a ways, if you look
from a distance, the earth seems to rain toward the sky
encasing the transient substance of the world
before burning.