Poet’s Corner: The world is raining all around

Rain is pouring down out of a leaden sky,
well, not really leaden, the sky is gray, gray, gray.
It is my spirits that are leaden,

Really this is too much, the weather, caught in a circular low,
has drowned June and is moving into July.

I thought I’d learned to laugh at the regularity of it,
the growth of slugs,
the shivering tomatoes,
pine needles falling off the trees in June and July—
from—what else?—a fungus that likes cold, rainy weather.

But today feels like the breaking point in a marriage going bad,
month after month of little miseries
and then one morning you wake
and it is enough—something has to change.

Except I have no control over the skies—
over the circular low stalled over the northeast—no solution comes to me.

Years ago, in a book
a man said See that stone wall running through the forest?
Those trees have been growing since 1816
the year without a summer, when snow fell every month
in Maine and farmers gave up in disgust and left for the west.

In England people carry their umbrellas everywhere,
plan their day and what to wear, after the weather forecast.
In England they would great this rain with a stiff upper lip
(probably developed after a particularly long
stretch of rotten weather.)

Perhaps I am wrong
with all this long distance surmising,
perhaps it is at just this point in a weather cycle
that elderly English ladies
move to Portugal’s sunny skies.

and, perhaps, tomorrow the sun will shine over Maine.