Saving Rain
We helped pick berries and we helped pick mushrooms and
helped pick garden vegetables and helped pick up firewood but all
by ourselves what we looked forward to most and
when it came did best was saving
rain--racing to ransack
the barn (board ladder with one rung saying "The barn
will provide") for bottles and cans and jars and buckets and barrels then
dashing to put as many as possible like firemen's nets beneath
the eaves where half-century-old rusting gutters were letting runoff slip
through, laboring like the practiced team the three of us brothers
were, to transfer the harvest littlest to biggest in
a kind of reverse bucket brigade, instead of scooping as much
as possible from cistern or fire wagon to heave at
a conflagration, heatedly gathering splashes and turning them back
into usable therefore useful thus productive
stockpiles--
or, if it wasn't raining, we'd make
do with running the garden hose down the sloping dirt driveway
and building dams.
Of all our endeavors in
that cavernously capacious, dreamingly revelatory
ark of historical leavings and familial accumulations, that is what we
remember with the tenderest fondness--droplets plinking
into precious containers while overhead the muffled roar
of a stormfront's downpour on a tenth of an acre of roofing
spoke of the warring, wasting world in which we would all
too soon be conscripted--
and now that the barn is emptied,
and sold, or at least emptied as much as any Vermont barn
is likely to be, and sold, I could never belittle as childish
foolishness, of the sort the Big Black Book proclaims the unsparing rod
shoul drive from half-grown hearts, our efforts
to save rain, to save is to gather, to gather is to pay attention to,
to pay attention to is to care about, to care about is to want closer,
and to want closer is to love, and loving at last
may be all we can ever, maybe all that is necessary.
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