Before the Rain
The blank field waits, not with silence
but with a pressure,
like earth before the roots push upward—
dark, fecund,
a question forming in the mineral veins.
Hands hover above it,
flesh-sure, yet uncertain.
They know the shape of hunger,
the ache for pattern,
for words to line themselves like migrating birds
across the wind’s stern geometry.
What rises is not voice, not entirely,
but a spill of ore brought up too quickly
from caverns that never cooled.
It glows, it smokes, it asks to be hammered
into a blade,
or a bell,
or left molten and dangerous in the dirt.
Each sentence—
a rib bone pulled from the great carcass
of possibility.
Each phrase—
a mirror that trembles
with the face of something
not yet human, not wholly alien,
the third thing,
the in-between.
And the writer, if such a name still holds,
stands like a lighthouse on eroding rock,
the lantern whirling,
casting long uncertain nets of light
into the storm
that will not stop making ships.
The question is not whether it speaks,
but whether we,
with our soft animal memories,
can bear to answer.
- Geoffrey Phineas Talbot
