April 16, 2012

Well, it certainly was a noisy night, thunder in myriad forms, long slow rollers, sharp cracks, echos down empty halls, some high-pitched and stuttering, some bass with growls.  I don't think I have heard such a variety of thunders in a long time, and pretty much constant as well.  Usually the thunder lasts only a little while, once it starts raining it seems to slowly vanish, but tonight . . . thunder all night, with the sound of steady rain, not a downpour just steady, constant sound water dripping off everything, the spatter against the windows, and into the water already standing making a pleasant sound.

Yesterday, we had a sunshower!  Just before sunset there was a break in the clouds and it was bright sunny, I mean like a summer day sunny, then it was raining!  A pretty hard rain, and the sun still finding a way through some spot so the rain was lit up like jewels.  I'm sure there was a rainbow somewhere but we could not see it for all the trees.  I looked up sunshower, which was the name of a book written by a friend in San Diego.  There are various words for it all over the world, and lots of stories about them, most involving, for some reason, marriage.  I guess the marriage of opposites, sun and rain.  They are called foxes' wedding, or monkey's wedding. or the devil's wedding where he beats his wife, too sad an image for me of such a rare and lovely thing! In Hawaii, it's called a ghost rain, perhaps the lover's ghost appearing briefly to comfort the living.

Today, it's just thunder and rain, all day, brief spots of quiet, but brief.  The rain continues to come down steadily, and make a thousand tiny noises into one long sound of wet and dripping, and the thunder keeps rolling over head, not moving on to some other place as it usually does, just hanging around, not even being too dramatic about it, kind of background noise thunder.

Rain

All day the sky
busy with storms
has rolled long breakers
of cloud from horizon
to a more distant horizon,
and the sound of thunder,
so many waves of voice,
crashes in its own rhythm,
the surf of it overhead
breaking the air
splitting it with heat,
cracking the high cold
like a glass bell,
water spilling over the edge
silent in its fall
striking a different
note from every surface,
ten thousand things
vibrating with its touch,
and we keep listening.

S. Crowson

I'm not sure why it seems I can never find a rain poem that tells the story of the rain I hear, or see falling past my window.  Maybe it's to make me want to make my own story, the dark sky, the sounds, the mirrors of water on every flat place.  Even dark as evening in the middle of the day, rain makes you look up, makes you actually look at what is happening, and hear all the notes played from the softest drip to the roar of the downpour, how everything has its own wet sound, and all day it's been changing its tune and it just keeps on playing.