Soft Rain

Tiny raindrops fall for hours, the kind of rain that sounds dry, like grains of sand falling on paper. The drops are cold, each leaving a sharp chill on the skin. After a while they accumulate and begin to fall from leaves and pine needles and the eaves of the house, and the night fills with drumming, but still the sandy sound persists as an undertone. Even through clouds the bright moon sheds enough light to dimly reveal the world, slicked plants and reflective pavements. The piercing cry of a nighthawk sounds again and again. I grow cold but cannot bring myself to return indoors. The soft rain has drowned my senses, and I stand soaked, breathing the damp as though I had become a piece of this landscape, absorbing sustenance from the sky as does the dark soil.

( Sunday Verse )

Delays

A single acorn woodpecker, drilling, releases an echo which had lurked in the utility pole. A single thrush sings. A single squirrel crosses the street, undulant gray on static gray, darting and pausing, leaving a series of airy tildes that change the pronunciation of the day. The day, too, is gray, a steely but rainless sky shadowing the word, keeping all lesser shadows at bay. Spring this year has been like that squirrel, proceeding in darts and pauses, eager but wary.

The gladiolus blossoms have come and gone, leaving only the dense clumps of spiky, green leaves rising amid the flowers of later-blooming plants. But for a handful of white petals beginning to wither toward brown, the lily patch too is now a mass of spiky green leaves. Its flowers arrived a few at a time, greeting the sunny days only to be pelted by the following rain and snow and withered by the cold.

Even th emergence of the dogwood blossoms and the mulberry leaves has occurred as a series of events, darts and pauses, so that the landscape has seemed to be unchanged for days on end, caught in some enchantment by which I have been unaffected, leaving me to observe the fitful passage of the season as though leafing through a stack of old photographs which captured scenes I might have seen once, long ago, but can't identify.

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Also: Never heard of him.