irreverence

The sky did its part, bleeding out gray and beaded water across the dampened map. Rain tangled with leaf and bough, spattering the pavement and slicking back all manner of boundless green. The hours just steam away, lapped up by the ravening wind, poured into the clay bidden earth. The storm leavens whatever's left of the afternoon, soaking each entreatment, drowning ever prayer. I watch the street, all cars and crows and raucous conspiracies of the other usual suspects. I watch the world as it is watered, punctuating it every now and again. Habits die the hard uncertain deaths of any deity faith can manage. The rain falls, whatever the words might want or waste. The rain falls.

There is never a shortage of gods and ghosts to haunt the shadows and cling to parsed reason. Evoked in all manner of blaspheme and epithet, damnation rings out its claims and callings. Hell and blessings stain each naked breath, shouts and curses trailing children and their dim keepers alike. Never a quiet moment that can not be cut with a careless tongue. Never any idiocy so startling or dull that a call for God can't make worse. Always I take whatever sermons are offered by the trees and the crows, and leave the rest for whatever cries and screams the rest of the chattering public deem worthy. A mother motherfucks her goddamned kids, dragging her shopping into the house. Blessed be, and then some.

Call down the rain in sheets and floods. Call down the storm in rattling thunder and fiery flash. The scrub pine drips and sways slightly, the mocking birds divining their next battle plan from grasping limbs. A scrub jay calls its threat from the fence post and the power line, supping on all manner of creature the rain would drown. A host of gulls sort out the field out back, taking the sleek skies in force. Nature endures insult and egress without any favor or hope. It is the theater of deep time, of the tireless cycling of probabilities and likelihoods over these plodding brutal millennia, each species winning only respite from the broad course of eventuality. Each appetite a calling, sounding the culling of the hungry and the fed. Each day a verdict reached and read. The rain falls.