In that Instant

In that instant before the raindrop detaches itself from the tip of the leaf, when the leaf dips lowest under the water's weight, and the water is moulded by gravity and tension's counterpoised hands into the purest teardrop shape; in that instant of luminous calm when the droplet seems to steal the sun that has now broken through the thinning clouds, and to radiate it outwards, like a tiny lightbulb, or like the projector of a liquid cinema that recreates upon its spherical screen a realm of such dazzling clarity and precision — a realm inhabited by leaves and walls, graves and weeds, a man sitting on a bench — that a whole life would not be long enough to explore it; in that instant of sunshine and rain, stasis and change, death and delight, that fertile instant that like all instants contains the soil of everything that has ever happened and the seed of everything that ever will; that dying instant that is no briefer than the dates chiselled in to the lichened stones, no more enduring than the breeze that sometimes vaults the walls, shakes drips from the unkempt grass, stirs the man's unbarbered hair; in that instant before the raindrop detaches itself from the tip of the leaf a kingdom is created and a serfdom is overthrown, a cave is illuminated and a cliff collapses into the sea — for in that instant a decision is made.