The persistent, pleasant palaver of rain;
like a wedding party passed in the night,
heard but invisible, some light deep inside,
the plangent melody of laughter fluttering
out. Very clear yet also bereft of any moorings,
free drifting and verging on non-existence.
A small gathering of kindred humanity, allowing
happiness to inhabit their cohabitations
for a few hours, or days, and then for its
memory to effloresce unexpectedly:
remembering laughter, which like all sounds
is abstract when recalled, a string of vocabulary
allowing for discernment between pleasure,
sorrow, the marriage of the two. The concrete
nature is in the gut, which instinctually
feels that gluttonous ache that arrives
from too much fullness. Like someone has
stuck a fist inside you and is about to
rip it back out. Portending emptiness.

Pleasure is the way your black hair cannot
be held back from your eyes (like obsidian)
when you laugh. Sorrow is the knowledge
that such luminous laughter, your uncontrollable
hair and candent eyes, is all I will ever have
of you. The two marry themselves in the night’s
rain, that peculiar acceptance that love fails,
and would not be so beautiful if it endured.

(the rain stops; the horizon burns amber, then white
and suddenly day is upon me, littered with puddles)