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I just don't think that this is what it's supposed to feel like, shaking my big one to break the stream and make a pool for moving my tools, for they only weigh half as much when moved under water. I emerged in the morning, covered in blood and fine acid sand and decided to remain partially submerged a little while longer. Itching for more exercise, and cooled not by water but by air, I spent the afternoon collecting sea shells, and found each one heavily carved with the numbers of pretty village girls offering to take tourists to the ultimate level. A spring and summer service they offer. I meant to call one, with a headline ready on my lips, but a gull would dive down wheeling and screaming each time I tried to dial. One can fool the animals, but must forgive this wild, beautiful country.

If things were worse, this cursed rain would soak me unto sickness, so Samuel Sewall might have written in his vespers journal. I have it on my writing desk inside. For three days I have labored with a saw and plane and many boards to make my girl a swingset near her mother’s lilac shrubs, as rain has drizzled cold and meaningless. How coherent was his world of works and days, when Plentifull Rains might connote a coming providence—so Sewall notes of Her Majesty’s Court, June the eighteenth, seventeen twelve. We are well satisfyed with the Layin out of our Money—

Soft falls the shower, the thunders cease! And see the messenger of peace Illumes the eastern skies; Blest sign of firm unchanging love! While others seek the cause to prove, That bids thy beauties rise. My soul, content with humbler views, Well pleased admires thy varied hues, And can with joy behold Thy beauteous form, and wondering gaze Enraptured on thy mingled rays Of purple, green, and gold. Enough for me to deem divine The hand that paints each glowing line; To think that thou art given A transient gleam of that bright place Where Beauty owns celestial grace, A faint display of Heaven!

With acknowledgments to “Rain” by Cynthia Barnett Whether the rain on Mars was delicate or brutal whether it was blue or gray whether it fell on bare rocks that remained bare or on fertile ground that raised large forests of leafing trees it could not last. Mars froze eventually in the same duration that Venus by contrast bowed her burning head in noxious vapors and gas clouds. • On planet Earth meanwhile after half a billion years of continuous volcano-havoc meteor storms earthquakes               and lightning strikes vapor stored in the atmosphere eventually began falling. It soothed the fires. When the fires died it fell silently on the first outcrops of moss. On the tender grass with a sizzle. With more strenuous drumming on the resilient fronds of ferns. It became an orchestra of millions across the luxurious expanse of the tree canopy. • Then the sun wiped its forehead with long filmy fingers and beamed afresh. It worked through to creatures flourishing beneath the canopy and persuaded them to interrupt their work of scouring on all fours for delectable roots and berries. In the clarified light they stared at their hands. They saw the wrinkled fingertips that gave them a firm grip on slippery branches and vines gradually smooth      and soften. They rose in amazement onto their hind legs and crept from shelter across the dazzling savannah. • After a summer of twelve thousand years after the interruptions of ice after one particular inundation and the shadow of an ark darkening fish-shoals as they scooted over hills and valleys after the blaze of one civilization then another after the destruction of several experiments with law and order after the extinction of many beautiful languages rain by and large found its place in the scheme of things. It began to defeat its purpose on the private sky of umbrellas. It babbled through long green fields and melted into the seams of poetry. It larked in the puddle of its many names. Cobblers and chair legs and pipe stems. Frogs and jugs and beards. Cats and dogs. Men. • Although they are shaped like a parachute thanks to the air pressure beneath them raindrops                     explode on landing. Then the sun bears down again fitting his monocle into his eye. The glass flashes and burns. The rain sweats and evaporates into the ocean of its air. The ocean continues on its way continually overflowing here and there in quick little splashes or reckless floods and drenching. It is delicate or brutal. It is blue sometimes              and sometimes gray. Sometimes it falls on bare rocks at others                     it raises large forests of leafing trees.

I close my eyes so that I can see it. What we so freely eliminate. Who is not guilty of it? We reek of paper. Everywhere we go is paper. Our hands are stained with paper. Walls. What echoes from our walls. The sweet whisper of rainforest— even the name makes the sound of rushing water or perhaps it’s a ghost that haunts us. They say the dead that did not die a peaceful death are doomed forever to wander the earth. But perhaps this earth is for them already a cemetery—stacks and stacks of flesh on a desk. Which one belongs to which tree? Already, we’ve traded oxygen for so much.

Adapted from the original notebook fragment written by Rainer Maria Rilke in Spain in 1913. Evidently, this was needed. Because people need to be screamed at with proof. But he knew his friends. Before they were he knew them. And they knew that he would never leave them there, desolate. So he let his exhausted eyes close at first glimpse of the village fringed with tall fig trees — immediately he found himself in their midst: here was Martha, sister of the dead boy. He knew she would not stray, as he knew which would; he knew that he would always find her at his right hand, and beside her her sister Mary, the one a whole world of whores still stood in a vast circle pointing at. Yes, all were gathered around him. And once again he began to explain to bewildered upturned faces where it was he had to go, and why. He called them “my friends.” The Logos, God’s creating word, — the same voice that said Let there be light. Yet when he opened his eyes, he found himself standing apart. Even the two slowly backing away, as though from concern for their good name. Then he began to hear voices; whispering quite distinctly, or thinking: Lord, if you had been here our friend might not have died

I spent the winter my father died down in the basement, under the calm surface of the floorboards, hundreds of little plastic parts spread out like debris on the table. And for months while the snow fell and my father sat in the big chair by the Philco, dying, I worked my way up deck by deck, story by story, from steerage to first class, until at last it was done, stacks, deck chairs, all the delicate rigging. And there it loomed, a blazing city of the dead. Then painted the gaping hole at the waterline and placed my father at the railings, my mother in a lifeboat pulling away from the wreckage.

Would you believe it, I got lost again And all roads led to Rakestreet. Which was which, The short road or the long? A girl of ten Behind her counter, drew me a thumbnail sketch Of space in time. The Big House was, she said, Five minutes away, or seven hundred years. Nephin, nebulous in its hat of cloud, A reference point. I would never get out of here Unless I fell in love with my condition— Rakestreet, with its boy behind the bar, Its sweatshop, and its permanent television In the background, rumbling from afar Of war and worldly sex, greed and ambition, While the dead slept under lichened stone Behind Kilmurry chapel. Older than religion, Older than history, this quiet need to atone By staying local, once at the very least, For an hour, a day, a lifetime. Marry the girl, Buy up the stock, become one with the deceased— Let Crossmolina and the Big House world Be damned to its own eternity, Lough Conn Forever signaled, never come upon, Lose itself, like the reason I came In the first place, and my aboriginal name.

Anna Bell and Lane, eighty, make small leaf piles in the heat, each pile a great joint effort, like fifty years of marriage, sharing chores a rusty dance. In my own yard, the stacks are big as children, who scatter them, dodge and limbo the poke of my rake. We’re lucky, young and straight-boned. And I feel sorry for the couple, bent like parentheses around their brittle little lawn. I like feeling sorry for them, the tenderness of it, but only for a moment: John glides in like a paper airplane, takes the children for the weekend, and I remember, they’re the lucky ones— shriveled Anna Bell, loving her crooked Lane.

October, and the leaves turned late but strong. Rock maples and the reds, clear brazen, blaze long-burning feats of sugar through our ways. Their strident hold upon the back roads pulls our morning drive, out to where Oak Woods Road crosses the river that they call Great Works. The nearby fields so rich it’s hard to breathe— the hay treacly with auburn, grasses bronzed— we stop before a red farmhouse, just shy of where the river runs, where maple trees have laid the front lawns ravished with their loss. From Booker’s truck we pull out sacks and tools, proceed to gather up the autumn’s spoils. He holds each big bag open, and I rake the broad red leaves together and inside. The crop is so much greater than our work could ever capture, even as we press it in, right close, to fill October’s urge, but we have cleared a windfall just the same: A clarity, the season’s morning hues, and our sweet chore have worked an art of fall. As autumn and the Great Works trickle by, we skim as much brimmed crimson as these few stout bags will hold within, enough to lay four inches of the fall upon his fields. October's task has raked the colors high. To turn 'em in, the soil to bed with yield, is just as good as planting winter rye.