8.25 Rainy Season

The rains came. The rains went. Two poems pop up in their wake, the first a haiku, the second a somewhat longer effort.


Downpour (haiku)

Three days in an ark
Turn the barrel upside down
Send it to July


Three Days’ Rain, but No Monsoon

Rain in the interstices.
I can’t see through the screen,
The garden misted to a greeny blur.
Surely this is some message from
The folks who teach us primal events
Catastrophes, floods, creation stories, death and resurrection
We are the aging cohort
The rain will clear… and grow us back.
Some of us.


I wonder if this rain will fill up the garden. And the answer is yes, for three days. On the fourth, a Sunday, I am back to watching the top layer of soil stiffen and gray.
Since I cannot go gracefully into that good night of no more flowers, I have acquired at season-end prices some flats of annuals and plugged them in, here and thee. That gives me something new to worry about, something new to worry about. I decide the season is late enough to dig up and transplant some perennials, I put a shovel to a colony of evening primrose which are bright and happy yellow in June but increasingly gray and skeletal as the weeks pass, especially this dry year. I decide to clear a row of them out, transplanting them to a shadier spot, and put in a flat of petunias as a temporary fix.
This means I now have transplants to worry about keeping moist in their early vulnerable days just as the weather turns dry and hot again. Four days of ninety degree weather forecast for the last days of August? It would be an anomaly except that now, increasingly, everything is.
So go back to hand watering, once again, with new seedlings to worry about. Also red salvia, portulaca and coleus in the front garden. I’m not sure how well any of these will do.
At the very lest, it’s a way to toss a few more ingredients into the mix of earth, stone and cellulose, and stir the pot. What we get is pot luck. As always, larger forces are at work.