Bloodwarm rain on the roof in the valley,
and it poured so hard that umbilical rivers
funnelled down the corrugations,
and we sheltered in the open window, high up,
our legs dangling into the drowning black,,
caught in an amazonian welter...

The rattling scream of cicadas in the hot suburbs,
with garden sprinklers switch-switching,
and mosquitoes engorging away
whole lifetimes of heat and torpor...

The distant and desolate and impending percussion
of a three-mile goods train
leaving the lit-up zinc works in the dark
of the empty hours, the dead man’s leaden watch...

A rising velvet flagellation?
a gut-wrenching humming
in the innocent ear-drums of eros?
the sound the stars might make if they were sculpted
from flight and flesh?
Holy noise, sacred sacrilege, hymn to the potent,
the magnificent, the animal,
the magnificát of the animus...

I know it, but can’t place it-
oh-so-familiar bass drone, symphony,
throat-singing of the sweet and weatherbeaten
Mongol...
Familiar, but strange,
enthralling and terrifying groaning,
the guttural exquisiteness of your
deep and ragged moans...
O! essential, primal music;
first word! incantation!

You penetrate me to my silent, insulated core,
mystery sound that is no mystery;
oh! delicious and death-defying marvel,
your coming, your extinction, your arrival!
Tocar, tocas, toca, tocamos, tocáis...
but oh!...to touch...