[Today’s writing practice, scribbled while killing an hour in The Coffee Grinder … Timor organic with sweetener and low fat milk.]
1.
He pulls the car into the garage in such a hurry that the radio antenna brushes the bottom of the door as it goes up, and makes a cartoon sound: oing oing oing. But he has no sense of humor to enjoy such things tonight. Moving automatically, he turns on just enough lights to find the bedroom, his sweatsuit, the coffee maker in the kitchen. Then he turns them all out again and stands looking through the glass doors at the rain drumming on the deck, and at the lights of the city below.
“Well, here we are, dark and it a’rainin’.” This he says as a prayer, a spell of faith in the night and the storm.
He sets his cup on the glass table near the door, beside a brass elephant the size of a fist, and goes out. He stands in the rain, lifts his face to it, hands clenched against his chest and says
“This rain began at sunrise, as rain always does when it wants to seem portentous, prescient. It imagines itself with tidings of solemn work or grief. But men know the rain is blind and deluded. Man builds his own sorrow, stick by brick, and calls the rain to wash it all away.”
He leans out over the drop – 30 feet into wet scrub oak and weeds – with his belly against the railing, arms spread wide.
“I want to give up. I want to retire from wizardry, the calling down of storms, dispensing clouds with my arms. My shoulders are hills of dark forest and it causes me terrible pain.” Relieving himself into the canyon, he says, “here’s what I think of the rain.”
The storm moves on to Bakersfield, San Bernardino, and falls as snow on Bridgeport while he sleeps. It’s Saturday and he sleeps late, gets up and puts the sweatsuit on again. He feels empty, a dry peanut husk. It takes an hour of CNN and three bowls of Cheerios to make him feel human. Shaving, he sees his face as from a satellite, all deltas and estuary. His forehead drifts like noon on the Salton Sea. His eyes are wetlands full of geese.
He feels better to picture his father before him doing this, and his grandfather also shaving. We face ourselves first in the day to get the hard part done, move on. He tells the mirror, “I am a man. I know the wind blows cold.” And zipping up his jacket in the hall, he says, “I am not afraid.”
Metaphor 