Читать книгу One Man's Dark - Maurice Manning - Страница 8

PASSION

All of the sumac is scarlet now

and the thistle heads have gone to silk

and around the field the goldenrod

nods in the rain, and anything

with leaves or height is lowered. Heads

must bend and bow, I almost say,

but then I have the thought that rain —

rain, rain, rain — is the voice,

the very voice of repetition,

each splash descended from the last

in form and falling rhythm, each drop

a long, wet verse before it hits.

Rain was my season when I was a boy,

and rain in fall was best. I’d walk

across the field and find the woods

where I’d lean against a cedar tree

and listen to the steady rain.

I liked the constant sound and motion,

how that sound and motion eventually

became the same blurred expression.

But then I’d hear a second rain,

a rain of solitary drops

that fell from the branches with less precision,

yet had an independent order,

a rain that couldn’t help itself

from being strange or stirring me

to believe the first rain — steady

and unified — is necessary

for the second, the other, singular rain.

An accidental counterpart

to unity, a blind pursuit,

like all desire, for the one design —

to fall not fully from the sky

and chase the chance to fall again?

I mean falling for the darker sake

of falling one way only once

and maybe never noticed or known.

What cannot be repeated, what

will not be uniform, what breaks

away defiantly from control —

I’ve been a student of this art.

It is one of God’s better tricks

to make monotony revealing,

but disruption is a subtle craft.

Rain makes itself and makes,

through more and more, the field believe

this is eternity for now.

But more and more of anything

becomes too constant and proves too true

and, so, the eternal must change.

Eventually the rain will stop

and the goldenrod and thistle heads

will straighten, and that will be the world,

or it will seem the world. But I wonder,

I wonder if these prolific weeds

will know they have again and again

been swayed by the God who begins above

in solitude by pouring out

a bucket, an ordinary bucket?