Rainstorm

It rained last night-- suddenly and full of lightning sparks.
The backyard was lit up in torrential, tropical wedges.
There was an unnatural greenness to this scene, (shreds of dreams still hanging over my eyelids).

When we sleep down here, it is with wildness over our heads;
a windscreen separates
out from in with a loose and quiet flapping,
a dark sound barely heard in our sleep.

Our house is surrounded by trees and bushes on all sides, a sort of white shell amongst arid desert dirt.
By day you might call the backyard a wasteland of hot weeded space.
At night the smells and sounds become tropical and green.

Combine the tropical with the local.

Texas vocabularies of snakes and desert willows, wrapped
in the lush greenness of Bahian cacao groves—life on a tropical plantation has always seemed ideal to me.

Sleeping through the hottest part of the day,
breakfast in an aerie cliff room of warm coffee (milk, fruit, porridge),
dollhouse rooms, shaded courtyards, vines of clematis and bougainvilla, distant calls of birds reaching over a tropical canopy.

Last night the lightning storm fell on us unexpectedly, with brilliant flashes and cracks of thunder. In my half-sleep dreamstate I was happiest to drift between sensations—
the smell of rain,
the sound of it hitting the dry dirt like small stones,
the sound of it running hard against the house, and
the blank, black softness of ruffled sleep.

The lightning called a ridged wakefulness out of the dark like a quiet mushroom uncovered. My night musings had wrapped around themselves, ends firing blankly like lit fuses (cut wires), tentacles absorbed in each other.

Simultaneous appreciation of opposites brings out the best in each—from a bare nest of bunched blankets, (my childhood front porch perch), grew an understanding of the thunderstorms that rolled in like fields of wet gray wool (sparking loudly) over vast front plains.