In the Gascon night, the voice of rain
Duets with a chestnut’s green spreading hands
Rain in its quiet mode
Wind, sotto voce
Trees wearing the strength of their 200 years.
Elsewhere friends and family wake
To rainfall, landslide, the groan of roots parting with earth
The sickening crack of trunks shattering
Falling trees shaking the ground
Streams become torrents, watercourses
Filling, falling over dams and walls, down
Streets and into basements. A young family
Scrambles up the hill away from death
In the pelting dark.
When I left there to come here
The forest floor and streambanks were soft
And deep with fallen leaves
Autumn—the fall—had come
But not yet the decline of the year.
Reality scoured those drifts of crisp
Sweet-scented leaves. When I make landfall
It will be to mud and scoured stone
To leafless wreckage and splintered wood
To the idea of death become fact.
My heart sinks: we say this so often it’s become cliché
But you can feel it when it happens:
The plunge
Hopes dashing against the waiting, immovable rockbottom.
In the kitchen, a glass hits the floor
By the dark road a cat tenses in the tall grass
In his room my husband coughs through the night
On the mountain an oak lets go
Of the boulder it has clutched for a century.
Weather is local, but this climate comes for us all
rain + wind + trees + gravity
Down down down
Where the future now seems to flow.
10/2/2024
