hard rain's a gonna fall

         Noah                                                           






 He has a talent for uneasiness,
drinks too much coffee, chooses to rehearse
the nag and riddle of the universe;
he scans the clearest sky for cumulus
to cloud the heart; declares, in self-embrace,
the arch-perfectionist a candidate for grace.

How can he sit at table, and delight
in cream and figs, and smile? He glumly goes
against the bright ideal of repose,
the lesser peace of coasting in the light,
like Noah in his arcane discipline
troubling wife and neighbour with his prophetic din.

Though he may see what others do not see,
poetry’s perception without power;
yet he abandons the sufficient hour
of milk and bread and apples from the tree
and schemes the hour the mind will not defraud
as he saws and he hammers, one eye on his god.

He salts the distant and unplundered sea,
forgets the portrait on the mantlepiece,
the oaken trestle and the bolster-fleece
and all heroic domesticity.
He sips his wine and spits his olive pips,
anticipates the pleasures of apocalypse.

And is it all a figment of the blood —
this famished, unameliorable mind,
this dream-demented, rhyme-encrusted, blind
imagination calling down a flood?
He stacks his eclogues in unpublished heaps,
diviner of a world in which the dreamer reaps.

So let him itch and twitch, a weatherfrog,
and watch his fingers stain with nicotine.
The nervous poet contemplates a green
Sahara, and, when all is night and fog,
the greater peace of sensing in the dark
miraculous mountains for his uncompassed ark.




                     David Solway






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