Rain

Posted on October 20, 2004 in Weather

We’re coming on the third day of blue skies — dark blue skies that pour out bits stolen from the ocean. Flash flood warnings splat all over the Internet as rain comes down down down. As I finished this sentence, I heard another wall of water advancing down the street. In front of it is this soprano drip drip drip boring holes in the air and the puddles on the ground.

The weather swings wildly back and forth like a broken door. This front may make up for the drought of 2004. We don’t usually get rain like this in October: it’s one of our drier months. Last year at this time, I worried about fires sweeping off the Saddleback. This year it’s the black tide of mud, an occultism threatening to deluge us.

Tomorrow I’d planned to go to Orange for a poetry reading. It’s important to keep your work before the public, develop a following. Here on the edge of Los Angeles I hope to be found, to be seen as good for something. Up until now, I really haven’t been trying. But the rain is coming down and I think I will have to cancel my plans.

I’m going crazy here. Crazy with the tapping. Crazy with the stiffness in my gut and my chest. I ate too much because I could not walk. Rain is good when it is is separated by a week or so of dry weather. I keep remembering as I watch the weather reports predict yet another day of precipitation the warning of local poet Lawrence Smith about the Santa Ana River: it’s been called the most dangerous river in America by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. (There — if I haven’t motivated you to believe by appealing to your common sense, maybe your patriotism will compensate.) In twenty three more days — if this keeps up — Prado Dam will fail and the Orange will disappear. Except for those of us who bought homes on hilltops. The coming flood — if it arrives — isn’t biblical. It will just be a disaster beyond all imagining.

A little excitement to make up for the incarceration this weather is imposing on us. I’d rather see the sun again.

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