Epic Rain

Ten hours of continuousness, the audio
promises, looped by a stranger
who’s enhanced the thunder, embedded trickles
from pine needles as from syringes,

assembled clouds, vast and digital,
to perform his soundtrack, so that a million amygdalae
can relax together, the frazzled city centers
resetting to Homo sapiens smoothness

and the far-flung, isolated bedrooms
begin filling with rain in the REM stage, and the delta
waves resemble the ones at sea
after catastrophe,

a civilization’s treasures floating
unencumbered: an Apollonian vase’s athlete
submerged, the landscapes
and self-portraits jostling like rafts over falls,

the chiaroscuro and sfumato, impasto
passages tumbling through foam. This is the brain
on benzos and earphones, frictionless
and plugged in, miraculously,

to the sea floor’s fiber optics, those tubes sometimes
touched in the gloomy gelatin by
a sucker, then withdrawn, of one who cradles
itself to sleep in all of its arms.