Downpour

As the downpour washes the moutains

into a painting

We follow the rhythm of rain

into millennia of paths

that bring us together.

Tonight, Maria sits by the window

to rub her eyes and make sure

it is just the rain

that blurs her vision.

Back at home, she never cries.

We are just carried away by the rain:

Different time or colors

now look similar.

The mountains, the rivers, the memories,

and many interpretations

of a painting, are rising

from far to near.

We listen to different versions of rains:

It looks like the vineyard in Sicily

where hundreds of folks came to a reading

by an American author. They may not understand

English, but the rain.....

He sinks behind the screen of rain, and she rises:

It's like the rain of bullets on the walls

in North East China during the Japanese war

which filled pages of .....

The rain beats the windows harder:

Like the tears of the Russian Jew,

after hundreds of years, still

exile with rain.......

What seems strange in other countries

now becomes familiar,

The rain has no brain to discriminate

the boundaries of nationalities

but fall into everyone's eyes

without announcing

the arrival or departure

of feelings.

From the roots transplanted

it may or may not grow:

in different climate

being neglected,

over or under ferterlized,

drought or flood.

All because of the lack of planning

of rain.

We don't plan to read tonight.

Just our hearts are pouring out

with the float of

neither tears nor rain.

It must be something more

than the beginning of

downpour.

1989, Massachusset at a poetry reading