David Capps – Five Poems

Some remarks on the poetry of rain

I

The rain’s falling is poetic if only because it emphasizes
the spaces between things.

Listening to the rain helps one learn to see.

II

Imagining the rain, imagining listening to the rain,
do not really differ. One never hears a first drop fall,
one always notices that it has begun to rain.

III

Raining is like the waters breathing,
in shining droplets
the waters seeing.

IV

Rain trickles down, solitary conversants
in an unknown language, while from time to time
a bemused ethnographer looks up:

How would I know before my thoughts are expressed
in this language, that they do not first occur
in the language of the rain? 

V

Dogen said: Decheng guiding his disciple is his disciple.
Perhaps the rain guiding my language
is my language.

A Prayer

The moon outside my bedroom window,
same moon by whose light a child holds
his hands together and whispers, moon

shining above the desert waste, where
snakes wait curled in rock crevices,
same moon that unites different worlds,

a candle that clears away the darkness
and allows us to see spirit undestroyed,
and body lifted as into your blue cradle.

Remind us once again of the importance
of sadness.

Myth

One grain of sand was milled to perfection, so that it was a perfect sphere when it fell with others in the hourglass, and the hourglass fell outside time.

Yet upon waking you rub the sleep from your eyes,
                             calmly you rub the sleep from your eyes.

Field Mice Speak Of

Stars as emptied out of a vase
in patterns of tough equations.

Small questions arise about
drinking flower-heads: who

put them there and why? Some
of the light, as if fallen into

a hex, bends with the squint
of an eye. What shall we name

her, this mouthless glass-blower
who stands by the banks

of overpowering wheatgrass?

Colossi

Chemiburnt and tundried excrescence through hall blakoncrete hyperwalls gearing staged neon glass loudspeaks initial III companichols screenoil rean threadbare multiwoodbetween filaments conferencing satisfaction drilling probing blind teleprompters metallic noise soldering public architectural works squandering corrosive bolts of greasebank blue hooked in march of blank facesconveyors of black shoes  

until a storm breaks open arc welders thunder lift their masks a window verdanterre as childhood

peasantly logjam day’s aloed aherd whence golden colonies encircle sinless sun yellow hinds in wickened air wheat colored drapery of ice and honey—

Switches behind, we clamored           towards white rocks
                                                            bodies shining
                                                            chisel
                                                            donkeys scraped
                                                            hawed on the cliff,
                                                            chewing sage and thyme
                                                            all birds of the sea rose to meet us
                                                            on bank of salt and beak

                            we whirl-pooled
                                                            to the bubbling corpus
                                                            of the mountain that had starved
                                                            its dry grit unchanged by wind
                                                            where Colossi
                                                            like tusks jutted out from its navel
                                                            mythically as wings of monarchs
                                                            resolving into stars.

David Capps is a philosophy professor at Quinnipiac University and recent MFA alum of Southern Connecticut State University. His work has been featured in Long River Review, Unlost, and All the Sins. He lives in New Haven with a fluffy Maine coon named Purrbasket.