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I sit with my railroad face and ask God to forgive me for being a straight line toward the dead who were buried with their poor clothes in the Arizona desert of iron borders. This way of waving to the embers of the past, not apologzing for carrying torn rosaries inside my pockets where beads of worry became fossilized insects whose dry husks I kept since a child. Faces adopted me from boys who hated their parents. I was told not to repeat this, reminded by the priest who unmasked himself. I was told there was a great horror down the hallway of the smelly Catholic school. Once, my friend Joey jumped off the second floor window and flattened his brains over the asphalt yard. I see a hibiscus blossom. It is a bright yellow flower that lasts one day. Its shape brings tears, saves me from the hummingbird that dots the air with patterns resembling an alphabet too familiar to smell like a railroad worker. I love heaven when I admit the spikes and the railroad ties came from the labor of fate and not the labor of love. The tracks are my cross. The tiny car is full of sweating men. They look into the eye of the sun, hold their hammers over their blackened heads. If staring grows in the common search, a perfume dots the heart with greed. Silence between the lightning of pounding stakes. Once, I rode the train home to see if the smoke from the speeding engine was going to enter my lungs. I never wore the old, yellow hat of the crew, but returned the shovel and the bag of railroad spikes, thought I saw my grandfather, the foreman, running across the desert in overalls, changing his skin from brown to the black of the scorched engine. I live with my railroad face, its smoothness hammered by sweating crews that knew the line of hot iron was going to end in the west someday. I live with my railroad face and don’t know why the tracks disappear on the horizon. I cross my railroad face and comb my hair.

Long before you see train The tracks sing and tremble, Long before you know direction Train come from, a hum Announces it soon arrive. So we tend to drop on all fours Even before we look left or right. We skip the sleepers or walk Along by balancing on a rail. We talk about the capital Where the train ends its run From the interior stacked with The outsized trunks of felled Trees and open-topped cars of bauxite. We always hide from it unsure What the train will do if we Stand next to the tracks. It flattens our nails into knives, It obliterates any traffic Caught by it at crossroads, It whistles a battle cry, Steam from the engine a mood Not to mess with or else. Rails without beginning or end, Twinned hopes always at your back, Always up front signaling you on, Double oxen, hoof stomp, temper Tantrum, stampede, clatter Matter, head splitter, hear us, Stooped with an ear to the line— greenheart, mora, baromalli, purple heart, crabwood, kabakalli, womara.

A lexicon of words that were not said in childhood, and all of those that were, were said beside an upturned boat, lapped planking of the creosoted shed, were said into the wind on tussocky ground, by farm-rust vehicles. The buildings I could not complete without my father’s help, the wind in which I was at sea. Rain blooming in August that moved the land and over land toward the autumn, sliding through the gates of summer, feeling for the bone inside the wrist.

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me Remembering again that I shall die And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks For washing me cleaner than I have been Since I was born into solitude. Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon: But here I pray that none whom once I loved Is dying tonight or lying still awake Solitary, listening to the rain, Either in pain or thus in sympathy Helpless among the living and the dead, Like a cold water among broken reeds, Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff, Like me who have no love which this wild rain Has not dissolved except the love of death, If love it be towards what is perfect and Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

The rain, in the backyard where I watch it fall, comes down at different 
rates. In the center a fine discontinuous curtain — or network — falls implacably and yet gently in drops that are probably quite light; a strengthless sempiternal precipitation, an intense fraction of the atmosphere at its purest. A little distance from the walls to the right and left plunk heavier drops, one by one. Here they seem about the size of grains of wheat, the size of a pea, while elsewhere they are big as marbles. Along gutters and window frames the rain runs horizontally, while depending from the same obstacles it hangs like individually wrapped candies. Along the entire surface of a little zinc roof under my eyes it trickles in a very thin sheet, a moiré pattern formed by the varying currents created by the imperceptible bumps and undulations of the surface. From the gutter it flows with the restraint of a shallow creek until it tumbles out into a perfectly vertical net, rather imperfectly braided, all the way to the ground where it breaks and sparkles into brilliant needles. Each of its forms has its particular allure and corresponds to a particular patter. Together they share the intensity of a complex mechanism 
as precise as it is dangerous, like a steam-powered clock whose spring is wound by the force of the precipitation. The ringing on the ground of the vertical trickles, the glug-glug of the gutters, the miniscule strikes of the gong multiply and resonate all at once in a concert without monotony, and not without a certain delicacy. Once the spring unwinds itself certain wheels go on turning for a while, more and more slowly, until the whole mechanism comes to a stop. It all vanishes with the sun: when it finally reappears, the brilliant apparatus evaporates. It has rained. Translated from the French

Toward evening, as the light failed and the pear tree at my window darkened, I put down my book and stood at the open door, the first raindrops gusting in the eaves, a smell of wet clay in the wind. Sixty years ago, lying beside my father, half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain drummed against our tent, I heard for the first time a loon’s sudden wail drifting across that remote lake— a loneliness like no other, though what I heard as inconsolable may have been only the sound of something untamed and nameless singing itself to the wilderness around it and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father and of good companions gone into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain and the soft lapping of water, and did not know whether it was grief or joy or something other that surged against my heart and held me listening there so long and late.

With thick strokes of ink the sky fills with rain. Pretending to run for cover but secretly praying for more rain. Over the echo of the water, I hear a voice saying my name. No one in the city moves under the quick sightless rain. The pages of my notebook soak, then curl. I’ve written: “Yogis opened their mouths for hours to drink the rain.” The sky is a bowl of dark water, rinsing your face. The window trembles; liquid glass could shatter into rain. I am a dark bowl, waiting to be filled. If I open my mouth now, I could drown in the rain. I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me. The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.

We had gathered under a tent in the park for some words before lunch and after separate mornings, and when—twice—the poet said “capital,” the lightning bolts that followed the noun had me bolting too; I’d always suspected God’s communist leanings, but now I regretted how few exchanges we know between craft and climate: imagine a rhyme inciting a rainbow, blood feuds bruising the sky, hymns of forgiveness bringing a soft new light to the faces watching the last act, waltzes and songs and declamations— this would be capital entertainment!— locked in a clinch with open air. But the lightning was as quick as it was loud. The clouds dispersed, and then so did the crowd.

A giraffe presented its head to me, tilting it sideways, reaching out its long gray tongue. I gave it my wheat cracker while small drops of rain pounded us both.  Lightning cracked open the sky.  Zebras zipped across the field. It was springtime in Michigan.  I watched the giraffe shuffle itself backwards, toward the herd, its bone- and rust-colored fur beading with water.  The entire mix of animals stood away from the trees.  A lone emu shook its round body hard and squawked.  It ran along the fence line, jerking open its wings. Perhaps it was trying to shake away the burden of water or indulging an urge to fly.  I can’t know. I have no idea what about their lives these animals love or abhor.  They are captured or born here for us, and we come.  It’s true.  This is my favorite field.

The day has pass’d in storms, though not unmix’d With transitory calm.   The western clouds, Dissolving slow, unveil the glorious sun, Majestic in decline.   The wat’ry east Glows with the many-tinted arch of Heav’n. We hail it as a pledge that brighter skies Shall bless the coming morn.   Thus rolls the day, The short dark day of life;   with tempests thus, And fleeting sun-shine chequer’d.   At its close, When the dread hour draws near, that bursts all ties, All commerce with the world, Religion pours Hope’s fairy-colors on the virtuous mind, And, like the rain-bow on the ev’ning clouds, Gives the bright promise that a happier dawn Shall chase the night and silence of the grave.