Porous by Ros Barber

Here, rain slips into rock as comfortably as a woman
sheathes herself in silk – the slight tightness of the one
eased by the other’s slatternly loveliness and the laws
of likelihood loosening like the knot around a lover’s craw.

All rains fall – the drizzle, the torrential, the stuff
that insinuates, tadpole-fat, between collar and scruff -
to find acceptance in this rock and layer by layer
slip through the lasting digests of prehistory.

Chalk is in a constant state of thirst, and yet
lets go. Rain falls through almost as though it’s met
a different kind of air: a slower, heavier atmosphere,
through which to drop and meet the sea below. Here,

acceptance is the law. And a person might, observing this,
despite a dryness in the throat, send up a wish
that the human heart might be so porous,
and absorb all that the heavens rain down on us.

— Ros Barber