The Rainy Season

by Dmitry Blizniuk

 

In the rainy season,
the fish deep down inside you comes to life.
A pile of rubble and sand resemble
a dead dirty lion,
its mane made of nettles seething in the ditch.
Street lights on thick stilts
plod their way through the sparkling fogs –
tall clowns hold lamps in their mouths
like pirates held their swords.
Dusk boards the city.
The days are flooded.
But I can’t swim up to your window,
which glows with soft apple light.
I can’t jump to the overhead wires.

The trees dance like black squids.
Goodbye, my phantom. A burnt child
dreads the fire. It’s just rain.
Just rain that hammers the tilted aluminum piles
into the softened ground.
Minutes, minutes, minutes.
The air smells of ozone and mushrooms.
Of fever, ammonium, and plagiarism.
The spidery shower licks its lips;
it bangs on the roof with
its heavy silvery paws…
Do you remember how cheerfully, how persistently
time dripped through the roof in the hallway?
We used buckets of clock faces to collect it,
or seashells of kisses.
And a huge moth in the kitchen
sneezed under the chandelier…

After the rain stopped,
the acoustics in your head is like an empty dolphinarium:
hollow, resonant, huge, and bright reflections slide across the ceiling.
It smells of chlorine, and of washed marble.
Our best days are just dew
on the sagging grass of memory,
on the pimply bodies of lizards:
motionless, they drink the precious moisture with their skin.
But someone has ordered to preserve us.