The Streaming Rain

 

 

The path up the hill in the forest

Has been walked by so many feet

Both human and much wilder

 For so many thousands of years.

I see the prints of their passing. 

The mud vibrates with all that life.

 

Today water courses down.

The rains of days and days streaming towards ground

In such sheets of clear drops

Onto the tops of trees 

Their leaves now open and green.

 

Dripping down through boughs and branches 

To leaf-mold and dirt below

 Seeking the places where the ground is lower

To run in streams

New and old.

All these droplets of water 

Desiring, as they fall

Yearning to collect themselves into one

Into stream, into river, into ocean

 

They must be together again.



And some human hand has made a small dam

Of rocks right here

In the gathering stream

And another just there to guide it

With gentle redirection, so sure

To plummet down the side of the gulley

Into a bigger  swift-rushing torrent,

Singing loudly there

Where it will not seem to make a river of the path 

Where humans pass.

 

But plunge on down streambeds,

Down hillslopes, to ditches,

To gutters, to river

To swell its waters

And bring the leaf dust and the soil that they found

 

 Thus make the waves of that water so brown, with such frothing

To stroke the banks of earth,  grass and trees

And caress the soil to come join them

 

Racing away in some wild heathen dance

To once again all be one

In that cold caldron of salt and sea creatures

That unending, immense

Soup of life.



The Negative

 

I pause beneath the dripping leaves

Chanting lines of children’s rhymes

 Happy in my walking time.

Then arching on  the crowded hill

 Lining through the pines,

 A ragged wave of silvery ash 

 Standing naked still.

The photographic negatives

 Preserved with those green  positives

 For that Grand Developer

To continue some great chemistry 

Of sun and soil and wind and time

That flows along with its own rhyme.