Percolation - poem

Sierra, July-August, 1992 by Jane Hirshfield

In this rain that keeps us inside, the frog, wisest of creatures to whom all things come, is happy, rasping out of himself the tuneless anthem of Frog. Further off and more like ourselves the cows are raising a huddling protest, a rag-tag crowd, that can't get its chanting in time. Now the crickets, seeming to welcome the early-come twilight, come in: of all orchestras, the most plaintive.

Still, in this rain soft as fog that can only be known to be rain by the windows' streaming, surely all Being at bottom is happy - soaked to the bone, sopped at the root, fenny, seeped through, yielding as coffee grounds yield to their percolation, blushing, completely seduced, assenting as they give in to the downrushing water, the murmur of falling, the fluvial, purling wash of all the ways matter loves matter: riding its gravity down, into the body, rising through cell-strands of xylem, leaflet and lung-flower, back into air.