Cold Front

July 7 2013


Humidity breaks
first with thunder, then with rain
falling hard, all day
cooling the earth.

In 10 minutes, I'm goose-bump wet.
A drowned rat

with slicked-back hair
clothes plastered to skin,
who squish-squish walks
in sodden socks
where water mercilessly drips.

On orderly streets

torrential gutters,
rivers, free to run.

And culverts, spouting up
small lakes

the colour of mud.

The ruts across the field
are swamped.
Cut
by teen-aged boys
in love with squealing girls,

fish-tailing punks, in pick-up trucks
gunned
under cover of dark,

one sultry summer night.

Hard-pan soil
is saturated, soft.
So as I walk
a meandering path
is filling-up fast
with small boot-shaped pools.

And after the dam has burst, the land's in flood,
it is foggy, windless
deliciously cool.
Grey light
is the same in all directions,
the world almost reverent
in its stillness.

Tomorrow
will dawn warm and bright,
when the great engine of the sun
will dry out the land,
lifting water
like a colossal pump
until the ground is firm,
the earth
restored.

Where my footprints
have left a small impression
on a spongy field;
the wavering path
of a rain-drenched man
in summer storm.

Out walking the dog. And who wants to be stopped by rain? We're water-proof, after all. No one melts in a little rain. Except it wasn't as little as it looked. And my raincoat leaked. Soon, my pants were plastered to my skin, and dripping down into the tops of my boots. And once my socks were drenched, I let go of any notion of staying dry. On the other hand, once you have cold wet feet, it really can't get much worse! The dog, of course, was utterly oblivious, and having her usual delightful time.

A cold front wedges in under the mass of lighter wetter hotter air, leading with lightning and thunder, and leaving a soaking all-day rain. Hardly breaking the humidity!

The second stanza was originally the very literal (and literally true) "soaked to the skin." But, like most clichés, I worried it would be glossed over. No one wants this in poetry, where the power comes from concentration and distillation: where every word should demand attention. (Although I do find cliché useful. There are times I intentionally use it ironically; or as a way to interrogate language, by re-imagining a tired expression.) So when I re-wrote this, everything else ended up coming under the microscope as well. And that's how I ended up with my favourite part of the poem: that small tangent into teen-aged punks and squealing girls, whom I can easily see fish-tailing around in dad's purloined pick-up on that nicely manicured field. I'm especially pleased with "sultry", which only came with the final revision. I like the conflation of libidinous summer heat with the urgent sexual desire of adolescence.

I also like "engine of the sun". You really feel its power --and its closeness to earth -- when the summer sun re-appears, and begins to suck up all that water like a super-powered celestial pump.

This poem doesn't have much to say that's really meaningful . And as with most purely descriptive poems, I fear losing the reader. So I think it might be enjoyed by one who appreciates close observation; a judicious economy of language; the occasional surprising tangent; and the sometimes vertiginous telescoping in and out from the micro- to the macro-scopic. In other words, it's more about technique and language than it is about theme and significance; about delight, more than meaning.