Rain and Words

Think of rain as words
for which definition fails:
newspapers, poems.
Still you keep on trying
and dig away at hard land,
raining single drops
on crops already dying.

Or new crops spring up
and cover the landscape with green--
pale green of oats
and the darker face of alfalfa--
where the corn tops out
higher than your crop of hair.

Still words are there,
always ready as a downpour of rain,
this time rinsing soil
down gullies.

Something about floods is remembered.
The Nile is there, words read in any direction,
the flood-borne soil
that fertilizes the delta with land
in solution, melted.

If you lie upstream;
it is your land that the torrent has raped,
caught in currents flowing.

Camp, if you can, near the mouth
where the words pile up,
add to islands that reform to a delta,
turn soil to land.

The soil that's there,
deposited in monosyllables,
both hope and fear,
build soil that's rich with new sound
so new words grow.

The delta is where two legs join,
where rivers run
and flow like red time through the nets of veins,
where papyrus grows in profusion,
prefacing words.

New words themselves are elusive
as stones you skip
out over the torrents of  floods;
what you kneel to find,
flat and smooth among jagged
and round;

when you do not find,
throw anyway,
do imitations,
sometimes spend time
sending stones you're convinced
will not skip.

Words are the rungs
we think we can climb to heaven.

They form our prayers,
are sacrifice
and the only thanksgiving
we have to share.

We stand on the bank,
water flowing,
and toss out our prayers,
spinning to skip across currents:
seven, eight, nine, ten;

are occasionally surprised at the stone
makes a sudden  "splut,"
so sucked down in the way
we suck air
or like something eaten.

We wonder which gods suck stones down,
what door’s been intentionally opened
and nowhere left for our ease,
only flow of  words and of time:
together malignant disease.