Weather Report. Tuesday, May 21, 2019: "No place is special except we make it so through myth and habitude"

Posted Tuesday morning, May 21, 2019.

“Moonlight” by Winslow Homer, 1874. Via Wikimedia.

Tuesday. 5:30 a.m. 45 degrees. Wind out of the north, 6 mph. It’s not August. It’s not the middle of the night. It’s five-thirty. Just after dawn. It was raining, softly, but it’s stopped. I’m not out on a deck. I was on the front porch with my coffee, not tea, but it got too chilly. But this poem by Sam Hamill describes my morning so far perfectly, at least the mood and the physical feel of it. So at the moment I love every line of it---except the last stanza. Where does the speaker get off thinking all his wife has to worry her in her sleep is that her sentimental old fool of a husband is wandering about in the night again, composing a poem that uses her as a convenient image? Mrs M’s still asleep, sighing in her dreams but probably not because she’s worried I’m out at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, pretending to write, and listening to the breeze that followed the soft summer rain stirring the leaves of our rose bushes which won’t blossom for another couple of weeks but when they do they’ll hold those red blossoms for more than a day. Still…good poem.

I woke past midnight
to the slightly burnt orange odor
of soft summer rain.

My wife slept beside me,
her breath punctuated with
the little sighs of a dreamer. Outside, pale moonlight
shone through the clouds, the great
evergreens dripping.

the katsura at the far end
of the garden turning
bright yellow already, although

it was early August.
I made a cup of tea and went
out to stand on the deck. I've clung to this place
like Han Shan-tzu
clung to his cave near the temple

on his beloved mountain.
I've watched these trees reclaim
a chunk of forest---slash,

waste and underbrush
when I came here
thirty years ago. No place is special
except we make it so
through myth and habitude. The forest reclaims itself
as best it can. Can I
do less? "No road leads the way," 
Kotaro duly noted his echo
of Han Shan's echo of Lao Tzu,
and hundreds of years between. I love beyond words this quiet rain
in these trees, the rose
whose stark white blossom lasts only a day, this garden
in moonlight, and the woman
who sighs, worried in her dreams. about her sleepless paramour
who rises in the night
to smell the rain.

---“Summer Rain” by Sam Hamill, collected in “Almost Paradise: New Poems & Translations”.