February 18, 2012

It's was storming all night.  It is raining and going to rain, and we don't even have any blackbirds this morning.  A nod to Wallace Stevens poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" one of my very favorites.  I believe it's trying to catch up on all the rain we missed last summer in one night and morning.  In the night the rain came down like a firehose, or maybe several firehoses, were just above the roof trying to put out a terrible fire, and it rained like that for the better part of an hour.  I felt like Noah in the ark with the flood coming down.  We've had a short break where it was only sprinkling but now . . . it is pouring again.  During that break the thunder was like a large sleeping dragon had circled us and was breathing in and out at every window, rumbling and rhythmical, and in that circle of its body there was distant light and nearby noise.  Now the thunder has moved closer, heavier and sharper.  The gray lowering and getting darker and darker.  There is more power to a storm than we like to contemplate, and this hard rain and loud thunder reminds me how fragile our warm dry houses can seem in comparison!

I'm not complaining about the rain though, because we need it still, and I have no trouble recalling all the dead trees and brown grass and shrubs, water restrictions and some towns running out of water.  It's hard to imagine so many people in the world without a source of good clean water, though it got easier last summer to contemplate it, and we didn't even come close to being out of water.

Water Becomes You

This water coming into your hands,
it’s old—older than today,
older than you are,
older than the oldest people you know.

This water has been around:
playing over and under the world,
coming up in different wells,
turning through the air into nothing.

This water will make its home in you,
become a part of you,
moving in your very thoughts:
old water welling up in new hands.

Heidi Mordhorst

So this morning we have LOTS of water, old water come home again from it's invisible life in the outer reaches of sky.  It comes announced by its own brass band, as if we need to have our attention called to the miracle.  We welcome it, and its noisy heralds.  The ground softens in its embrace, the trees stand bare, sleeping, soaking it up and making it the sweet sap of spring.  The maple is already clothed in its sexy red dress, scattering seeds from its basket of branches, attending the perfect marriage, between rain and the earth.