Rain, and: October Light

Rain

I watch the farmer stand next to the scarecrow.He believes the scarecrow talks. When I comehe loses his power of concentration.He watches me touch the pumpkins in their web of vines,corn in their green dresses with golden hair, the locust leaves.He hears me fall through the willow.

Hard to draw a line between the scarecrow, the farmerin his garden, and the man in a basement building a pipe bomb.The farmer's wife is making soupwith the chicken that wasn't laying. She is good with an axe.She chops the beets, onions, and potatoes with knivesher husband sharpens. That's the kind of relationship they have.

The farmer's wife has always believed you reap what you sow.She gives her eggs and vegetables to the local food bank.Volunteers at the elementary school her son used to attend.He lives in the city now. The crows do not associate herwith the scarecrow dressed in her husband's shirt.She talks to them daily.

She and her husband have not forgotten their waywith each other. They read lines from the booksthey love at the kitchen table, latertheir arms and legs intertwiningas they come together. Some nights I sing on their roofand they fall asleep smiling.

I know this part of the world, the fields and hills liftingon one side into the Cascades, the other the Olympics.This is the country of Mt. Tahoma, cougars, bear, elk,and sacred canoes following the sea in the old tradition.I have passed over these fields, mountains, and seas a millionand more times a million. I have passed over this house,garden, scarecrow, and the basement of the man building the bomb,his hands steady. I know what it is like there to slidedown thirty stories of windows on umbrellasheld under the skyscrapers that spear the clouds.

When the man plants his bomb and it goes offin the apartment building where their son lives,they can't sleep. I know they don't hear mefalling on their roof tonight. But the scarecrow hearsand the crows. And the thunderand lightning will follow soon.

October Light,

I need you to hold me overafter the final harvests—lastof the corn, its silk tasselsof male flowers spent,the grapes picked, wine bottled.        Spiders want in.        The pumpkins at Carpinito Brotherswait for the picking. The leftovers in Novemberwill feed the crows their Thanksgiving dinner.        You sing a lullabyone hour, rake the hillsides the nextloud as the neighbor next door swearingwhile he rakes his fallen leaves. I gather and press maple leaves between two piecesof waxed paper.        I don't question myself for hanging onto what dies in such glory.        I want glory.You tick, October, inexorably to a weak reflectionof yourself in November, December, January …        But in your month, your lightnestles me like an egg. The fire-gutted foresthours away waits for a clear sky, finally,for what we know,surely,        will be budding next spring, the earthyearning to stitch its green blanket again.        Yet each year my body reminds meyou are the month my sister, after seventeenyears, chose suicide. You,my birthday month, always now as you alwayswere, tied to death.        I don't apologize for this needto be held, me who thought for so many yearsI'd been a changeling, October,left at your door.