Names of the Rain
“A real gully washer,” say farm folks,
ranch hands, and we feel the flood.
So too in the silent life of sound,
words like cloudburst, sun shower,
downpour, drizzle, and mist brim wetness
weather itself seems to be speaking.
To which hydrology adds names of its own.
Fossil water lives underground,
an aquifer, a lake with its eyes closed,
whose droplets when sky-divers
were water meteoric. A desert shower
made strange is virga: ghost rain
never quite touching down. But if to fall
seems half of all that water does
the other half is rise,
since one time or another old ocean
has gone everywhere, been everyone.
So coral lagoons set sail in rose cloud
turning to snow drawn up by patriarchs
of Idaho forest. A witty friend slips away,
re-ascending as larkspur or spruce--
which may explain my being so taken
whenever a high-country stream
refills my canteen in rain’s truest name,
its fast unanimous surge, all brilliance
and blur and bright side-trips
that never forget how to be water.
