How quickly the weeks roll by! I can remember lying on my great-aunt’s chaise lounge while visiting with my mother. Maybe I was 10. I watched dust motes sift slowly down in a shaft of sun and thought life would never happen–time was standing still. But now it goes so fast it’s like the old movie image of calendar pages flashing by, dates streaming away in the wind. Which is all a prelude to a poem for Monday. I decided to use one of my own, as we finally had some rain, and in the clarity of an after-rain morning, I remembered this one.
Grammar
When Nietzsche said we no longer need God
because we have grammar, he was talking about
a morning like this one. The rain has finally paused
and patches of intermittent radiance play over the washed world,
illuminating first the water, then the bridge,
then the towers of the city that gleam white for a moment
before a focused mist, like a celestial
garden hose, sprays a single patch of downtown
with a filmy, golden gauze. And to top it off, the light
glides over the Golden Gate and creates a rainbow
smack between the orange towers, opening
upward to a vault of lapidary blue.
And the brain hums and leaps, inserting pattern
and meaning into this display, because grammar itself,
every word we use demands it,
the way the twelve gunmen
need a story to justify their ambush
of the unlucky Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan,
the way that we are always inserting divine intent
into every random raindrop.
Meryl Natchez