AFTER THE RAIN, AND KANT




At the sound, he turns from his cell-phone
toward the shag-barked cedar, looking
for the singer of this liquid, bell-clear and exuberant song
I feel rippling across my chest, cascading
from the raintipped
trowels of the rhododendron,
his body cocked, listening.

We listen as the song repeats, and again, irresistibly
smiling. Now it stops, and the speaker
turns back to his phone, and I watch
as with his free hand he points
toward the source of the gone song, smiling
still, his weight
shifting as though he needed it all

to convey it, the bird there, the song there—
now waits
as though to know what I see in his actions—
some deep and momentary
we unsayable as the song itself.

A robin flutters to the lawn. Is it
our singer? Soundlessly, it tucks its head
like a grade-school running back, and lifting its tail
skitters forward, stops, jerks
itself upward. Tucks. Runs.
We’re back in business—

my neighbor tap-tapping on his laptop, me
grading papers on Descartes’
world-emptying dream. Now and again
I break, listening toward
the mountains for a music so transparent
I’ll be tempted to say that it is us—
yet it will not be us, because it will be
objective, irrefragable, free.