All Day Rain
All day rain
dribbles down at such a steady pace
it seems it's always been this way
and always will.
The air is uniform grey,
an even mist
giving it stillness, weight.
The light hasn't changed since dawn,
and you wonder if time is out
the planet stopped
the sun's begun to cool.
Yet never accumulates,
soaking into soil
sieving through strata
collecting into veins.
How water seeks its level
all the way down to the sea.
No puddles, pools, streams
overflowing, running-off.
All day rain
on insatiable ground
in a steady-state earth;
a perfect balance, in and out.
Where, like cold-blooded creatures
we sleep-walk through time,
apathetic
as the nearly dead.
An underworld
of damp dripping wetness
where we dream of a heaven
that's warm and dry.
A poem I've put off writing for a
long time. Because I've already written an "all-day rain" poem. And
because I resist weather poems: it's too easy a default, sitting down at the
table to write and looking out the window. But that poem was years ago; and the
strong impression you get in this kind of weather seems worth writing about.
I tried to create a feeling of
changelessness, stability, uniformity: the feeling you get when the rain is
steady, the air heavy, the light timeless. When there isn't even a rising
puddle to measure by, pooling water to gauge. But there is also a kind of
serenity here: a steady-state earth, a perfect balance.
The over-all feeling, though, is of laziness. Which led me to the nice metaphor
of the final stanza: the zombie-like walking dead; a damp underworld beneath
the low unremitting cloud.
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