In a Dry and Fiery Season

He holds back the waters and there is drought;
He sends them forth and they overwhelm the land
-Job 12:15

There hasn’t been a gust of wind all this August long; not
One breath from nature’s lungs to come along and cool
Earth’s Sun-turned-surface, nor my burnt-as-for-an-urn-
Face (but some burns come from heart’s core or furnace).
So some may say of May-born me: he’s as ashes-to-be,
Was born as if to burn, his baby-face first a hue of blue,
Drew nor blew air- and therein lies his life’s useful clue.

*

There’s been no new dew, now no wet to help undo
An undue dryness we were caught in like some bug
Stuck in a web; each inch of riverbed, gorge or gulley,
Once fully in flood (even as was a blood that rushed
Till it blushed once-too-bluish flesh), sank into mud,
Shattered as if glass and webs; they, being so deep,
Might’ve wept at not being wet in a string of weeks;
But they, like some (or me?) in their summer grief
Now far past the green, were too dry for weeping.

*

Now only tons of browned leaves, in form as of tongues
Stuck out from mouths dry as out-and-out drought itself,
Powdery as moths, showered down: but did two months
Too soon to be included among Autumn’s own mounds-
Showed wounds and bruises and were dead altogether,
Premature among others impermanent but true to nature
(None are created for forever, but each too soon to swoon
Is one fewer coloring with a fever that fires my own blood).

*

Now I’ll know how, after too long a drought, what rush does
Come upon brush, shrub, bush and branch, never can blush
And brush as with a dozen colors; all that awful fall lushness
I lust for (must I admit I admire such a being-lit-up just a bit
Too much?) is lost in browns that drown out others brighter;
In a jaundice that skims over an Autumn skin and can sink-
To-burying a ruby or berry-red, with no weaker color spared
That spread that can, like any vampire, sap red of its blood
(Each blighted leaf, as some men, an undead specimen…).

*

Each brittle leaf is like a little life, all-but-dead before the fall,
Half-dead upon a life-stem, not yet severed but barely borne.
For some of us it seems nature rushed to shed summer’s inks
From forest’s skin: not for flames that might light like a lamp
Limb and palm (so eye saw every limp leaf hang like a hand),
But to burn some almost to a crisp before our air was, or frost
Was on the pumpkin, or even before its skin turned orange,
Long before any nut turned red or brown and dropped down.
Too soon in its coming the loveliest season can be too soon
To leave us, be brief as breath, so we sense even a last gasp,
An eleventh hour, and our dozenth frozen month, all at once.

*

Now a billion limbs that might’ve lit a tortured life with touches
Of infinite torches red or orange are weather-withered to brown.
Whither these leaves, light like feathers in breezes, will be blown-
Whether to some hell or else any similar realm we’ll hate no less
Than Hades, is anyone’s guess; so goes happiness, won and lost,
As does a ghost, as a guest come and gone as sudden as a gust…
I’ll see fallen on the ground all around me one or two rust- or russet-
Colored browns, but none of that rustic gold, copper, bronze or brass
As crowns Autumn’s burning auburn brows in an absence of drought-
Many seen dead or dying before the scene’s taken the season’s dye,
So many sons, as it were, but no less nature’s lessons for the living
That our changes can’t wait since fate is stingy in giving us chances.
(Brain too has its branches and channels in need of waves and rain,
A million billion limbs limbic and cortical, emotional and critical-
Is an organ that can shrivel and shrink more than any orchard fruit-
While Mind is a cloud, neither white nor gray, using wind to move).

*

Nothing but suns did bud, but those soon into high noon bloom;
No cloud loomed that could occlude one single ray raining down,
Any stray as bright as a whole array, each unbent, Sun-sent stem
Radiant as many sprays arranged in a dried-up bucket-bouquet
(Nothing in a dry-like-hell-well to swell life’s shell back to the full;
It isn’t quite so, but so it felt when I felt the heat might melt me).
Under the Sun’s fruitless rays each grape shriveled into a raisin,
Each peach, pear and plum, once so plump, shrunk to a prune,
Life’s juice used up as its vain joys, and the heart too dry to cry
Over vines never to produce a cooling wine (a nectar sometimes
Like fire for our veins, a Bacchus that can deluge and delude us,
Tone-deaf, note-blind, into believing we’d beat out Bach’s music,
The Muse of the Vine doing its duty in lieu of both Mind and Nine,
Siren-inspired by too much dopamine in lieu of anything divine-
Growing grandiose over our most otiose and blandest notions).

*

In a flat-as-leaf state fat is as lean, each sweet tastes as ashes
(All that was sweet we set aside as waste, as if to eat it is to die),
Taste has no palate, sight no palette and sound no roundness-
Or what roundness it has rolls away into the flatness of a plate
(With whatever feast set out on it only leading, at last, to a fast).
Space was a vast waste, east and west, no shape cast its shade,
Rainbow rays fated to fade to seven shades of gray; what was left
Of grace itself almost felt as if it should shrivel up into a grave sin.
(Still, even dwelling in hell, I knew well one can be Heaven-shriven-
Life never so bleak its black didn’t show at least the sliver of silver).

*

Any blessing of wind now must come, I suspect, with no less dust,
Each puff with some touch of or much suffering for us to offer up;
Some offset to even a sum, to balance rain and sun, pain with fun,
Crying after laughter, fall among summer, morning amid midnight,
An evening of life’s seven and its six, and often states might mix:
Sun-dry right into sea-wet so we see in one sweaty season sundry,
And like vines fiery and wet intertwine inspiring springs amid fires,
Springs in icy winters, even states too odd to imagine till lived in…

*

On sunny days floods might strike sudden as a flash of lightning,
The crash stunning us right after, some thunderous shout under
Which soul or self quiver like a leaf; when the soil is so solid
(More resistant then than even when sod-soft and all-sodden)
Water can’t sink in more than under a cover of over-oily skin-
Too much inner resistance as a distance too infinite to touch
And even seven seas’ onrush is runoff offered back to a cycle
(Cyclical like some psychical sickness, or so much in nature is).
A good we rashly wish for we watch wash away in a flood of it,
See the rain then with pain, rue its rush in the hour of our ruin
As surely as we do so many an achieved opposite-extreme:
A stream lost in flood, though we swore nothing was worse
Than an empty bed (then we swear some cures are a curse).

*

To see the stream go lower till it ceases flowing is no worse
Than seeing it seethe as the sea when a nor’easter’s blowing.
In time of drought nought flows or glows, flowers or floats,
All falls well below its level, wells went to too often as fully
Empty as the pails; and where shall we go as all else fails?
Still, channels can swell with a month-worth in a moment,
In some sudden summer-surge and with it urges that flood
A sluggish flesh and blood by as much as it was under once…
As dormant volcanoes in fiery fury blow their core or cone,
Or mud, stone or snow flow down over a town in a moment.

*

In nature we see a turtle emerge from its shell, the serpent
Its coils, the Monarch soon from form of a worm or cocoon,
Or May’s bloom from April’s monsoon from March-on-brood-
Mood move to mood as one month marches on to the next…
Seasons may charm us to a March hare-madness, turn mood
Thorny as a hornet before it ceases to be, or us horny as a goat
To go at it- make the tame as wild as a lion for meat and mate,
Or mild and calm as a lamb in balm of sleep beside the sheep-
Make us as fleas before false fears or be fierce in face of bears
(So we turn gloom-and-doom, loony or sunny, based on moons
And seasons; we seek out a sanctuary in January and February
As bruins do, and in our own black, brown and bearish moods
Are moved to growl at the ground, howl at moon, scowl at sun).

*

We can’t hurry our hurt, rush away our sorrow, woe, worry or fury
In flurry of activity, nor weigh a world’s weight as if it were nothing
But something to ignore; better try to wait it out with that patience
Obtaining everything we can’t pay for, or worth not throwing away.
Time is no knot, yet not a line-in-space I escape in quicker paces,
Is no it but is maybe me-in-it moving through minute-by-minute
Though not throwing it away as if the nothing I get is quite enough-
And by savoring save it for we’re born as flowers placed in a vase.
To wait it out, or for storms to pass, passes as a master strategy,
But best to recall all are as grass that shall pass on into eternity:
In future we’ll pasture or perish based on our pasts, on how well
And truly we love others and lose ourselves (as pastors tell us).
Without energy to flee or feel still maybe I’ll find strength to will
To love- waiting for emotion to move me being a way to lose love-
And unable to be free of these painful places by my racing away
I’ll see if caring for others is the cure to carry me away from me.

*

I’ve wondered whether death’s specter comes too soon to some
For their lives to be beautiful like leaves we include among ones
Lulled into falling after a full-on season (such specimens gathered
Together in masses bright as a child who’ll laughingly leap in them,
Him to whom even evening chill will feel warm as a welcome home).
Little rain from (say) late May and June on through July into August
Is a trough of drought enough to dull the fullness of coming color,
Can ruin the beauty of these later-on trees, so lower their fiery glow
We first hoped for that we might desire the white of an early winter
(And leap into life’s pale white milieu in lieu of a pile more colorful).

*

A drought can seem so deep down we all but drown in it,
Make us dry to even below the bone and begin to believe
That we first were thirsty nine months before our births.
(Even like one who begins by being premature by nature
I’ve had longings for Autumn for as long as I remember,
For analgesia of nostalgia, amnesia for a far-off future).
Long enough I’ve known- if only one can care to carry on
Beyond these skeleton and carrion months of summer-
Some more rain comes (often in tenth-month monsoons)
And soon all cools down as colors warm amid all that fall
(I’ve lived, overall, amid less harm than good, thank God).
All this is to warn me to remember to endure until the end
Of four months (each a foe, none a friend) that must come
Always just before those four ones of ber I live and long for.

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