The white flame of a deer’s tail bobs among the laurel. Another doe shakes her head, flinging rain water in all directions.
rain
Cold rain drips in the pre-dawn darkness. The wail of a locomotive sounds frighteningly close and full of an obscure, mechanical longing.
A dark dawn. As light grows, the rain falls harder, thundering on the porch roof, drowning out all other sounds but a locomotive’s wail.
Rain. I’m mesmerized by the driveway puddles, how rings of ripples form and overlap, each raindrop magnified at the point of termination.
The ground is still saturated from Tuesday’s rain. Through the hole in my yard, the sound of the underground stream’s insurgent song.
No wind, but some slight motion of the air brings the sound of trucks and the sour smell of sewage up the hollow. The first drops of rain.
Muddy footprints cross the porch and stop in front of my chair. Their probable owner crouches nearby in the rain like an evicted squatter.
Warm and wet—almost a March day, were it not for that rustle the rain makes on leaves, still crisp and curled in the first blush of death.
The walk is shiny with recent rain, and the west wind is damp and full of sounds from the valley: tires humming, the heavy thrum of a train.
Rain. And in the woods, a continual downward flight of leaves, meandering from side to side like all lost things. The rain falls harder.
Rain and fog. A pileated woodpecker performs invasive surgery on a locust tree next to the springhouse, removing a malignant colony of ants.
The lowering sky lightens a little when the rain finally starts. Yellow leaves flutter down from the walnut tree like exhausted moths.
Watching night turn to day—a thing that should be gradual, but instead proceeds by small leaps of realization: “It’s lighter now!” Rain.
Days of rain, and the stream is only a gurgle. Even as the sky clears, in the woods the rain is still making its slow way to the ground.