Color study: rain

"For this reason words are, and will always remain, only hints, mere suggestions of colours." -Kandinsky

The rain fell in the way that is called "the sky opening." Picture the heavens as proscenium, curtains flying apart as if some lovestruck stagehand took a machete to the ropes in jealous destruction. What is thunder but a thousand sandbags crashing onto hollow stage? All those trapdoors, the underfoot rendezvous. After the rain settled, the sky turned tornado-colored, an eerie underlit yellow tinged with green. The wet June feel sounding like frogs in the distance, at the edge of hidden ponds. The azaleas here are shriveled and scattered through the grass, the rhododendrons and peonies lording their pinks. I never knew flower names. The frilly words seemed pseudonyms--chosen for professions of which old-fashioned girls were ashamed: actor, stripper, novelist. The cicadas, meanwhile, are supposed to be on their way, but I haven't seen one, nor the lanternfly nymphs that were a polkadotted blight last spring. Yesterday, the largest iceberg ever known waltzed into the sea. Things happen, violently, and I nurse a small grudge. Awareness is a morass. Bombs fall, disease waxes in Lahore, a man in San Jose shoots his friends. The sky, it opens, and then, not an hour later, it shuts. Dark maples glimmer with the rain they hold onto like reasons.