THIS LATE PLACE
Stephen Watson
In the darkness of the winter Cape, cold rain fills
the bulging dams; sea pours, dull-foamed, storm-turbid
across the offshore boulders. In the wind that blows
north-north-west, bare-chested, air as if torn off in chunks,
clouds lumber in their columns, slow, leaded by a cumulus,
the earth tilts back its face, clear-soaked, unblinking,
to swallow throatlessly.
Now as rain crowds on the roof
late in the afternoon, you pause, cross to the window
to watch a sky flood south, contused, to hear the wind
quicken in the dark, blooded by the flocks of leaves
that rush skywards, the wet birds flushed from the marsh
In the darkness of the Cape, this late place of streams
now yellowing, thick in spate, its trees a coal-dull black,
cold rain still gathers on a window where you're drawn
to watch it storm, to pause, face almost to the pane,
as if you were still a child, and it could still be true,
and you were not confused, remembering you once lived,
that child, face to face before a sky whose space
was soaked right through with night, and silenced
before the size of weather, the presence of the earth.
Stephen Watson (1997)
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