Rain from the Islands

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I.

A rain blows in from hundreds of US military bases,
roiling through spheres of interdisciplinary radar.
It cannot be stopped or made to fall as think tanks want.

One particularly Christ-whipped congressman
has written a bill to disband the National Weather Service.
Maybe that will help. Others are employed to doctor
official reports, omitting what they do not like,

the measured warming effects of carbon dioxide,
and the measured carcinogenic effects of that rat poison
gasoline additive MTBE, and the measured tax cuts,
good for the supremely rich, bad for the common good.

II.

As the Civil War statues watch, the rain
exerts dominance and rushes in, drenching
external gunpowder, soaking certain fish-scented
project proposals, and thickening the holographic sky
into blue-black canyons flooded by holy ordinance
where Iraqi people are dying in battle, visible
from halfway around the planet circling back.

The rain loosens buried experiences of top soil,
its interrogations shaking up longhouses of defeat,
and if this storm wants, it pummels someone
standing still with a few truth-seeking volts.
It's a hard rain that shakes brain chemistry
and questions unanswering authority.

III.

It's a storm of redistribution, lifting all
the boats or none of them. Its trains continue
to run faster though never entirely formed,
its secretive gas cans are planted in white garages,
its wastes are always themselves, culturally
developed like lines from Hamlet studied
through windows for centuries. In each drop
is a bank vault of mirrors showing everything
else in the world but the person looking.

The closer we get to this rain, the more it floods
advanced mathematics with impossible problems.
The ocean levels are rising, and the president's people
edit it out. The progressive educational system
would make a reasonable international ambassador,
but the presidential party is afraid of people
who have studied. Funds are promised, then cut.

IV.

The end of oil is a whale song playing in the fall
of a drop of rain. It is a seal's cry to a mate far away.
And the beginning of labors many have never known
soaks into monocultural yards around the city.

This rain has arrived, parting the stone lips,
the stone mouths watering and sputtering
with last bullying and last binges.

The rain slows down over the dying gentlemen
in their blank facilities, releasing ozone for widows,
and speaking in movement to those who can move.

Centuries of stone watch this one instance
it might as well be, the cool ultraviolet
of the thermals, the anger from those whose countries
have been beleaguered, the steady turning away.