July Rain

They are asleep.
Imagine the things they are dreaming of
that will never be -
Satie's Serenade for piano and flute,
Kant's paper on the psychology of aquaphobia,
the surviving sketches of the full first movement
of Nielsen's Seventh Symphony...

all of this melts away
to the sound of the water on the weir
(like Ludwig dreaming of rain against the window
five days before he died).

Stagnant, directionless,
melancholy has killed the murder of heat.
The damaged are hiding,
gone to ground,
to find more life for next week.

Mistakes disappear just as thunder dies away,
the path is clean after the rain -
the rains so gentle,
as gentle as your face
as it smiles in the post-diluvian flood of light.