In December, the Rain

eclipse
can you
see it?

In December, the Rain

…And the dead go on, not turning,

knowing but not saying.  And the living

turn back to their day, their grieving and their staying.

                                                                                Grief

                                                                                Wendell Berry

While I slept a warm enough December

rain feeling almost (because I expect something

different) tropical.  It’s in the mid-

fifties and the best things to know

about close-to-winter rain is how cold

the wind will blow and how much

or not enough sun will deliver the continuing

water to the steady and consistent

slip into the still unfrozen ground and maybe

reach into the cloistered roots in their dark

beneath us all.  While I slept

and the water sunk and the thermometer

measured mid-fifties and kept me

safe, the spaces in the base of the maple

(dying on the lawn, but still erect, still tall)

are open like throats—do they know, close

to the ground as they are, that snow

is only ever held off for so long?  Do they know

no amount of their now dead leaves

and no matter how close I’ve banked them

to the foundation that they will take

their places against it all as long as the wind

stays in a certain direction?  They gape on this

street.  It was beneath this tree

last week a robber walked, a someone who took some

of everything I had and threw away the rest

and it wasn’t raining then but it was

December, the first day in fact, and I’m just

now remembering, though what could it mean

but nothing, a coincidence maybe, my mother

was buried ten  years ago on this day

and beneath a tree too, and three men took

turns holding her stone urn because the grave

wasn’t deep enough it wasn’t the required

three feet and these men, one shorter

than the rest, was hip deep and axing

with the blade of the shovel (there’d been

an early freeze that year) a root I assumed

that finally with one appalling bone-snap

to make for her a place deep enough and flat

enough.  And the men handed her down

the line and finally at the bottom

of it all and the guy he needed a lift out after-

wards and shovel after shovel of dirt on top.

And me beneath that tree until it was all

done, till we all turned back, the rest of us,

the few who stayed, and the mound, because it was

December in the Bay of Funday, was bitter

the bitterest I’ve ever felt, a swearable profane

pain to the gloveless spitting men (because

they’d come not knowing, who could know?

they’d be digging a deeper grave) beneath

a tree stunned, that one undone root

throbbing like frost-bite I’d bet money on

rested against that walled in bit of ash

and me taking to home taking warm guilty-

as-a-thief breaths in a house I no longer belonged
in.