Rainmaker: Monsoon Lessons
It takes
so many thousand years to wake,
but will you wake, for pity’s sake?-Christopher Fry, “A Sleep of Prisoners”
I.
I began to make rain at an early age.
The weeds exploded with sharp, tender stickers,
the laundry dripped small rivers from the clothesline,
and puddles of crystal liquid stood still as glass
in the cornices of buffalo grass and dandelion.
Not all such efforts were appreciated.
The hook-shaped yellowjackets jerked
into their dirtpod nest under the carport eaves.
My mother cursed the sullen sheets and towels,
the dog ran in circles as if possessed.
Rain can be unpredicatable in the hands of the uninitiated.
I wanted to do something about the thunder -
it was cause for alarm – the same sound as a bomb, I thought,
never having heard a bomb. The voice of doomsday.
Nothing could be done about the thunder.
So I learned to love it
and all its wordless warnings and commentaries
on such a small world as mine.
II.
The knowledge of the world comes on the tip of the tongue
it rolls in with the tide, covered in salt,
and leaves its bones to dry.
I picked the spiked and funneled skeletons from the beach
one by one.
put a shell of a word to my ears
and it whispered
shhhhhh…………….
There is a message in words beyond their remains,
and beyond the memory of what has already been said.
III.
Behind the great thunder that announces rain
is a question a thousand years old:
What is it that we see?
The same answers come back to us
in familiar shapes, scents, and textures.
There is a reminiscent blue, a sad green,
love’s round corners, and a pointed guilt,
the rough edge of a thorn, smooth oil of blood;
small roses that smell like hard red candies,
the twisted shadow of an iron gate slanted across sunlight;
an empty house deranged by ancient morninglory
vines that open full magenta mouths at 6 a.m.
In this life it’s the job of the rainmaker
to call forth a cleansing wash of color
over everything preconceived,
thought ordinary, over all the ten thousand
things.
Without intention, the clouds release rain,
Pockets of debris from other universes.
Their soft pink bellies hold food
for the sacred fish below.
When you begin to understandthe connection of water and words,
of sacred fish and food multiplied
for centuries;
when you begin to understand
that one contemplative footprint
is a word in sand, consumed by water,
you are ready for the vacant hope
of faith.
Faith leads the rainmaker, with no motive at all,
to wrench water from a sky that was hot and pale
with emptiness, just hours ago,
and to love the miracle, again and again.
IV.
Rainmaker’s logic is all about focus.
Begin looking now, into this light:
a candle burns without intention,
and holds in its waxy heart
the light that comes and goes.
Ask without intention. Pray as if breathing.
Prayer is a language cathedral
that goes dark at dawn.
V.
Soon after I decry the absence of clouds,
it’s monsoon season in the desert.
Kamikaze rains attack at random,
Wet steam rises from the cacti,
low-lying roads swell with dark water
and we swim through the air in a trance.
The sunsets are Neopolitan ice cream,
the sun a bruised peach simmering in custard.
When this is over, I’ll be waiting for
the wisdom that’s supposed to follow the storm.
These 40 days and 40 nights have gone on forever.
VI.
Something from that life spills into
this life
I’m waiting to hear my name called.
Like familiar water full to the lip
of the glass, I want a taste
of what I have created, sediment and all,
till it flows pure and smooth and empty
as faith.
