Bestiary for the End Times

Come on Rain (Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere)
            After nanao sakaki, and because the rain is animal, too
 
I listen to rain falling
            on a rotting thatched roof
I listen to rain falling
            in a mildewed concrete cistern
I listen to rain falling
            into thickets of mountain laurel
I listen to rain falling
onto a slanting, tired earth
           
                        I listen to rain falling
                        on the Niger delta’s sluggish smoking black waters
                        on Jaduguda’s uranium caverns
                        on the poisoned wheat fields of Sonora
                        on the leaning concrete blocks of Bhopal, the garden city
 
I listen to rain falling
            on the rebirth of the California condor
            among granite pinnacles
I listen to rain falling
            on the warm updrafts of Plankton
            who draw down the invisible smoke of the Atlantic
I listen to rain falling
            on the favela portraits staring skyward
            on the Navajo sheep  starved of grass
on the white corals of Okinawa.
 
By the island fortress of Alcatraz where the artist Ai Wei Wei
            sleeps his dragon kites and lego blocks
            I listen to rain falling into the peg-legged sea.
In the steel and glass wasteland of Jakarta  
I listen to rain falling on bankers’ synthetic suits
In midtown Manhattan
            I listen to rain filtering through to the asphalt-encrusted earth
In Fresno and Hollister, land
            of agrochemical flowers blooming
            I listen to rain falling                 if it only would fall
            into the basin of flames into the cradle of ashes
 
In the rain, you can hear the thunder laughing.
 
Come on, rain.