June 19, 2012

Grom . . . the Russian word for thunder and there is a lot of it this morning, rumbling from far away and closer, seems the whole area is socked in with clouds and intermittent rain.  In the night rain poured down on and off like someone flipping a switch, hard rain for a few minutes then a trickle, then just dripping off the leaves, and then hard rain again and the cycle repeats.  I sort of imagined a line of rain bubbles trailing over us, bursting, then emptiness until the next bubble burst.  This morning even gray light and the rain-darkened leaves and branches drooping under the weight of water.  The birds all sheltered somewhere else and too cool for cicadas.  Even the gulls that usually come in a little from the bay are absent.

I am always looking for a poem about rain . . . one that shows some new thing that rain brings . . .

Rain

Toward evening, as the light failed
and the pear tree at my window darkened,
I put down my book and stood at the open door,
the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,
a smell of wet clay in the wind.
Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,
half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain
drummed against our tent, I heard
for the first time a loon’s sudden wail
drifting across that remote lake—
a loneliness like no other,
though what I heard as inconsolable
may have been only the sound of something
untamed and nameless
singing itself to the wilderness around it
and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father
and of good companions gone
into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain
and the soft lapping of water, and did not know
whether it was grief or joy or something other
that surged against my heart
and held me listening there so long and late.

Peter Everwine

Now it is raining again, hard, another bubble burst, and an evening darkness taking up the sky, the sounds of all the water, drumming on the canoe, splattering from the trees, even running off the roof to splash on the back porch making almost a roaring equal to the thunder.   You can feel the deep thunder in your own chest, vibrating as the windows do with the bass of it.  There is little wind so that sound is not added into the mix, the only movement of the leaves is the water falling on them from great heights.  

We need the rain . . . the fear of drought begins to crawl into us now when there are just a few weeks without rain, the dryness edges into our sight and we begin to suspect trees are dying, and crops withering in the fields.  The deep darkness of a good soaking rain is welcomed and we do not hurry the clouds away to get a glimpse of the sun.   We give up the sunlight to have our continuous green, a small sacrifice, and for some, who love the rain for itself, no sacrifice at all.  I just saw a blue jay plummet from an upper branch to land huddled on the smooth curve of the canoe and slide off, catch wing and vanish.  I don't know whether it meant to land on the canoe and it was slippery or whether it fell out of the tree and slid off, but since it flew away, I hope it was all right.

The darkness is expanding, more rain is coming.  What is it about rain that seems to make us nostalgic, or melancholy, or filled with the quiet joy the sound of it sometimes brings?  It may not be the rain but what is inside us that goes out to meet it and bring it home.