The rain began at 4:40.
I was in the bus to New Jersey.
Out of the black and grey poured the days in Old Haven.
A Woman teaching her child;
Her manner, a soothing mild.
A Man violent than the wild;
His manner fit for the Cheapside Tavern.
The rain lashed them all through the windows.
And the bus and I fled through the meadows.
The fear of what would of them become
If the Angry Man were at home;
The anxiety of seeing the cane
And its stroke across the mane;
The goodbyes, the helloes;
The lone chair listening to lonely cellos;
The violins playing for a sombre fellow,
Trying hard to maintain a feeling mellow;
The table aloof from a conversation,
That went downhill with every note and intonation;
And the curtains all aflutter,
with winds of a worrisome bother.
In thick sparkling drops were they all.
And these drops then began to fall,
Thick and heavy from an eye six feet tall.
The grandfather was no more.
The walks, the laugh--all lay buried in Basil'n'more.
The house--motionless it stood,
Not knowing what it had withstood.
The fall of the demons within had lashed its mind in its muck.
The fingers of the light had curled up and in its palm stuck.
For no one wanted to go there,
And no one wanted to be there.
Lest they sink into the ground that beneath it lay,
And uncover a thousand splendid Pandoras
Weeping for the boxes they had allowed to run away.
The rain fell and broke down into a flood.
That washed ashore a pair of eyes-
Eyes that that had sorrow all over their gaze,
And a fire that, at New Jersey, was all set to blaze...
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