We’ve had so much talk about the weather because it’s been weird and difficult.
Too cold for too long
(in my nineteen years living in Durham, I can’t remember a March like this one)
and gray
In the twenty-first century, weather might be the one thing we are universally subject to
along with things less obvious–the pull of gravity, the planets’ revolution, the phases of our moon.
Weather exerts undeniable influence.
This morning, after days of gray, the sun is out.
It has just now cleared the pines at the back of the neighbor’s yard
and the grass, spotted with sodden leaves, is suddenly green
and all wet with dew.
The top rail of our fence at the edge of the yard,
lit up with unexpected sun,
is releasing yesterday’s rain.
But this rain is nothing like weather, which pelts and pits relentlessly.
It’s nothing like anything the weatherman is going to say with his maps, his arrows, his predictions.
no matter what they told you about “steam.”
This rain is meaningless.
It is merely lying along the fence: some wetness soaked by sun.
It’s an insignificant spirit of yesterday, the ghost of weather past.
But standing at the kitchen sink, where I too am soaked in sunlight,
I catch it in its quiet act:
it drifts up from the railing in curls of sheerest white.
Today, yesterday’s rain shifts and turns, its fingers twisting in the morning air.
It entwines itself on nothing
or on something I can’t see.
It floats, furls, dissolves into the sunlight,
and still there is more of it,
rising like a miracle from the washed wood.
Nothing to see here. No weather at all to speak of
Except, of course, this rain, this silent glory, all His.
