Rain on the Mesa

PLATEAU POEMS

RAIN ON THE MESA

Whatever winds disturb the Ægean Sea

With yearlong memories woven into the white

Snow-ridges of watery hills; whatever men

Are driven on reckless rafts across a brine

Where no Nausicaa comes now to play

With dark-eyed comrades on the beach:

Here is no wind, and equinoctial rains

Fall without potency on a sandy waste

Where no man hears the subterranean brooks.

Along the Connecticut meadows, clover-sown,

If the indeterminate rain of fruitful spring

Is laden with unsubstantial pain, with the strange

Melancholy of the rhythm of years, the renewed

Decay and the ever-decaying renewal: here

More strange the rain, when on an April dusk

It darkly clouds a disappearing sky

And throws its futile drops against the grains

Of uncountable soil-kind to the patches of beans

Planted with ritual faith by the Pueblo clan,

The little patches behind the adobe towns;

And kind, with the pathos of natural things, to the wild

Grasses that sturdily thirst in the dry, where flowers

Are dwarfed with faint rain, but publish their paeans

On strengthened stalks, and tall, to the heavier pour.

But whether the clouds burst out their leaden core,

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Or whether some globing mist grants the hot earth

A scanty delicacy of shower, the sand

Most sucks it down to the greenless lower layers,

Condemning secret pools almost to lie

Like fallow diamonds in blue clay, except

For communion with shrewd bunch-grass set in the sun

To speak ironically of water-cool,

Life-soaking water-to those whose lost springs mean

The thickening of the turgid blood, a throat

Swollen to pitiless dust, to pitiless death.

Here, if ever, the vanity of all vain things

Is frank to the evening, neither a whispered soft

Evanescence of frail suggestion, neither a wild

Storm-blaring cry of despair, but simply fact,

In the futile drops, in the fruitless dark.