I live on the Gulf coast.
It’s late June,
And it seems like its been raining
All month long!

Inhaling this Louisiana air
Is like breathing into a squeezed out sponge.
The musk of salt water, mildew, and mold
Everywhere.
We are swamped
By the faint odor of primordial ooze,
This invisible haze
To fill the nose and lungs.

But the rain,
The rain is so much more than this.
Our rain is stubborn.
Our rain is pushy,
Our rain, well…
I suppose it’s not that much different than yours.

It is the nature of rain
To howl so hard.
There is no shushing it.
It is the intent of the persistent precipitation
To be heard!
To be heard
Despite our best itunes effort
To drown it out.

And drowning is another word;
The awfulness of gullies and swollen streams,
Runoff jumping muddy banks,
Painting outside the lines,
Submerging cornfields, cotton fields,
Alluvial residence of rice and soy beans.
Washing up and around ancient mounds of silt,
Carving out willow crested islands,
Soaking the ground like a discarded mattress,
The weight of it, uncaring.

As if, in purpose, it should be seen as
Volatile, dangerous, and determinedly destructive!

Flood waters to rise,
Like ax blade hefted high,
Only to slice deep into the earthen levies,
To crack the concrete dams,
To sever the elevated roads;
To lay them open and bleeding,
Open and bleeding.

The overflow to gurgle and coo,
Brown and babbling
Like a newborn babe,
Keen on destiny and the chance
To grow, to explore,
To free itself from
Mother’s gentle but firm embrace;
To run its course,
Making light of the
Battered old banks of a thousand
Lakes, reservoirs, and rivers.

Greedy is the rain.
Surging, writhing, gushing,
Ignoring private property signs,
Marked boundaries and fences
Maliciously shoving them aside.
A n’er-do-well drifter coveting everything.

These are the ways of the rain,
An accomplice to the rites of Spring
And her unquenchable thirst for life.

This is the cunning of the clouds,
The repeated chant of a primitive song,
A seasonal anthem
Of call and response, call and response:
From air to river
From river to sea
Over and over again…

And we,
We are made to listen,
As we scurry, slink away,
Hide inside our tenement house doorways,
Beneath our skyscraper canopies.

Oh, how we like to deceive ourselves,
Thinking we are greater than the storm,
Greater than any liquid sky.
Fooled by our umbrellas,
Tricked by sweatshirt hoods and hats,
Rain coats and goulashes.
Convinced by cedar pilings,
Concrete and cinder-block foundations,
Wood-frames, steel beams, brick, and aluminum siding,
Slate and asphalt shingles…

Who are we kidding?

Everything can be washed away
In the blink of an eye!

Fooled, are we
Allowing ourselves to think
That we have gotten the better of this,
This incessant dripping.

We think we have trapped our rain,
Caught it in our water barrels,
Our cattle troughs,
That we have channeled it via aqueducts
And irrigation canals,
Relegated it to our reservoirs
And our water towers.

But it is hard to tell if we are
Truly in control.
It’s hard to say
If we have any say in the matter at all.

When rain drizzles steady
For weeks at a time,
When the rain evades
One patch of dusty earth,
Preferring rocky mountain slopes
To a parched and thirsty plain,
It’s hard to determine
Who really has the upper hand.

When rain and temperature conspire
To blanket hills and valleys
With quilts of heavy snow,
Clinging to tree branches
And power lines;
Icy fingers to snap the strong and the frail
Like toothpicks.

Or throwing up a foggy net.
Not caring who gets caught in it.

Or pounding with the wrath of God,
Attacking roofs of tin,
Denting barns and car tops
With icy baseballs pitched
By cruel tornado winds.

Or screaming in on ocean gales,
Flying sideways,
Penetrating every hidden seam.
Hurricanes, and nor’ easterners
Taunting us with their brutal force
Disregarding any kinder-gentler vision.

Like water running from the
Sidewalk to the street
Then down into the grated gutter,
This short passage
An illusion,
A momentary fiction.

And so it is that we,
We have come to worship the rain,
To curse the rain,
To praise and rant about the rain!
Insistent and demanding,
Some days greedy for
Those big, fat drops.
Praying for those cumulous shapes
To bump together like a wooly herd,
Corralled until the bleating grey
Condenses and falls.
This the hopeful quenching
Of a caveman’s thirst.

Pretending in our modern shoes
That we have come
To understand the rain,
That we might reason with it,
Convincing ourselves
That it is listening intently
To our every word.

So too,
Like spoiled kids
Bored with a play-worn toy
We rage against the
All-too-familiar,
The clouds that boil up and over
Lingering for days on end.

Our conversations turn
To sunnier times
And we state for fact
That we are languishing
Beneath the stubborn storm.

We roll our eyes
As lightening streaks
The blackened skies,
But the unsteady flicker
Only serves to make us
Less at ease.

More jittery
With every peal of thunder,
Protesting now
That we are victims
Of the battle raging;
Lamenting power outages
And downed tree limbs,
Grumbling in our barometric depression.

How fickle
Our rainy day affairs.
How arrogant our attitude,
To cheer and then to complain…

When our cup runneth over!



Michael S. True
6/25/14