Colder than snow
is how it feels, the year’s first rain,
falling on a dark afternoon
the last week of January.
The neon signs
downtown already are blinking,
probably, patchily tinting
the hoods of cars, the ample crowns
of umbrellas
afloat on a washed-in clamor
of honks, whistles, shouts; but here,
upstairs in an old wooden house
five miles away
on the abrupt edge of Kyoto’s eastern
line of hills, the darkness and the rain
alike come peacefully down.
It’s an old house
that seems older as the rain falls,
rooting out from the walls
a resin whose power it is
to dim all signs—
the strings of dental floss, books
and sweat pants, empty donut box,
stubby pot-bellied hash pipe,
maps and wayworn
backpack—of the current
American tenant,
as if to restore this room to those
whose once it was …
This salvaging illusion (that it’s
only time which separates
past from present, and the links still there
by which we might,
stooping, enter yet-simpler houses in
this former capital, old even then,
of a castled nation whose moat
was the salt sea
itself) is unshaken
by the click-clatter, as of wooden
shoes, of a tall schoolgirl, scooting
along, holding
an opened magazine over her hair,
or by sounds of a distant car,
groaning, as any horse would,
at the steepness
of the hill. The city’s
fading, or falling, or folding inwards as,
moonlessly, the cold outspreads itself;
those streams running
freely in the streets will be locked
in ice tonight. It’s difficult
not to view this weather
as anything
other than a deepening
tightening, a fiercer colder gripping
of the ground by winter …. Only if
you close your eyes
as though about to sleep,
or in truth to sleep,
will the new year’s first rain
perhaps summon
that long-gone and looked-for season
for which so many subterranean
spring-wound clocks are set; probably
only to those,
if any, at the shivering limit
of consciousness is it
evident how a colossal, exquisite
mathematical
accounting even now s in preparation,
a one-to-one correlation
whereby each raindrop’s knocking shall
have its answer—
together when, then, under
some newly exploded sun, each tight blossom
opens like a door.
