A Plastic Toy

A Plastic Toy

jp melville

I note for a moment

how the rain falls gently on the earth.

I only have a moment,

because,

like so many I know -

my friends, my family, those in passing in this world in which I live -

I will soon be busy with commitments,

general matters of consequence.

It is morning, early,

all night the rain has fallen,

the sky deep grey.

A moist breeze slides in the window of my studio

cools my naked skin for I am shirtless,

and now rain pitters on the leaves of the trees.

There is a soft shush

as the raindrops sink into the fields.

A gust of wind, hmmm,

scatters the papers on my desk,

some wet comes in too, but I don't mind,

dawn caressing me,

why worry about dampness on my floor.

The season is summer.

For us that means

days of heat,

days of sunshine,

days of rain,

these months have seen good balance.

Now this gentle rain,

different.

I feel a closing coming,

end whispering in the syncopation of sensations.

The date is mid-August.

Friends have been hard to find.

Everyone so busy.

Plans have been impossible to make.

Run run run to get work done.

Oh my, I sigh,

we have such short time

to enjoy the sun

everybody works so hard

the warmth is gone before you have known it.

Soon, in just a few weeks time,

autumn will have arrived.

Already we see the colours changing in the older trees' leaves.

Hints of yellow.

Hints of red.

Hints of brown.

This rain, I know, will hurry that change along.

This is not a summer rain.

This rain is cool with the breath of frost hiding in it somewhere.

I can see something else from my window

up here in the studio

situated high up in an empty barn

originally built one hundred and sixty years ago,

a red plastic toy for children,

floating in a tiny twelve foot diameter pool

bought from a conglomerate hardware store,

with a circulating pump attached by a cable

to a hydro pole with a meter

and then to wires strung out to the road,

the paraphernalia of a material world

which does not know today's change in the weather,

nor feel the cool

pang of change in the season's heart.

The man who lives in the house next to the barn

drove off in his imported automobile this morning

to commute into the city an hour's drive away,

departed a little earlier than usual,

because in a few days he and his family will go on holidays,

and there is extra work to do to free himself

so that he can take his family away from home for two weeks,

there is nothing here to keep them,

the plastic toy silent in the swimming pool does not feel for them.

I can also see from my vantage point

fields swept over with wild flowers,

now aged, browning, and creating seed.

In the distance there is a forest.

Once a farming family lived here,

more than thirty five years ago,

but they left the place, abandoned,

because there was no living to be made here anymore.

They moved to another place,

I don't know where,

and their children's children have no memory of the blessing rain I feel.

For us who live here now, in this world I know,

of highways, telephones, and savings plans,

the rain is weather, an externality,

not understood to be our blood,

we believe our income feeds us

through exchanging cash at the grocery store,

we do not feel the heartbeat of the rain,

beginning to rest,

its pulse in seasons

knowing that the winter is coming,

how for a time all will be still.

The wild flowers and seed know the rain’s alive,

Cast and cared over them all spring and summer,

giving life,

what always will be has come again,

Trust me sleep with me birth with me she says,

for someday soon, the plastic toy, the pool, the pole, the wires,

and the car will go forever.

I listen

I hear

The rain tells me that this is so.