rag water echo

It was in the good and strange middle spring and the rain kept announcing itself on the doorsteps and the railings of the town. As it bounced off of infrastructure and the top of eighteen wheeled trucks, rather than die little deaths, the drops found their way into the streams and sometimes even shone like amulets brazen and precious. A small area of the earth can be a world, and the electric lights sing lonesome and of particulars like just the few square feet around them.

It's a lonely spring night in the world but we are okay and do our duty shining in the rain, say the lights.

An old man sits in a window that is now all peeling and cracks and moisture. Old cloths once stronger soak up a leak and the man drinks sometimes coffee and sometimes tea. He counts the hours but for no reason and once and a while the radio is turned on.  When he listens to the news of the world he thinks,

Such excitement. So much looking at the world. So much dizziness in the world. The people are caught in something. It sounds as if they are jumping up and down they are always so excited.

It goes like that. Always. Sometimes the spouse dies decades before....

Oh world, oh word, thinks the man. And he checks the rag and wipes the sill a bit. Then he goes to the sink and wrings it out. He looks up again, out of habit, to the window that sits like an old bird above the sink. Outside of it he sees parts of the storm rushing down past house lights. He hears it all echo somehow. Maybe it is in his mind. Old sheds down the way get shot up by drops. Going back to his chair he sits and waits and watches the outside. The water rushes like the secular rush. The storm drains overflow and threaten the boulevards.

Oh world, or word, oh world, softly says the man.