Rain

I have been in Fuzhou for three days now. It has rained every one. I think the water is probably dirty before it hits the ground.

Nothing is washed away in these showers. The detritus (plastic bottles, the disemboweled chrome of crisp bags, cigarettes, fruit skin, etc) bubbles up from the sewers and water washes muddy clay under the oily boots of workmen (There is always construction. Always something being torn down, or something going up). After the rain, the plastic and organic corpses rises from the earth to remind us of our terrible interconnectedness: the permanent and uncountable reverberations of our lives. It recalls to my mind that somber closing of James Joyce's The Dead, but here is no solace:

that rain which has always been echoing, its drops fall faintly through the universe, ...upon all the living and the dead.