Summer Rain

No, it's not summer, and no, it's not raining. I just found this over at Lance Mannion's place and liked it so much I had to repost it.

I woke past midnight
to the slightly burnt orange odor
of soft summer rain.
My wife slept beside me,
her breath punctuated with
the little sighs of a dreamer. Outside, pale moonlight
shone through the clouds, the great
evergreens dripping.

the katsura at the far end
of the garden turning
bright yellow already, although
it was early August.
I made a cup of tea and went
out to stand on the deck. I've clung to this place
like Han Shan-tzu
clung to his cave near the temple

on his beloved mountain.
I've watched these trees reclaim
a chunk of forest---slash,
waste and underbrush
when I came here
thirty years ago. No place is special
except we make it so
through myth and habitude. The forest reclaims itself
as best it can. Can I
do less? "No road leads the way,"
Kotaro duly noted his echo
of Han Shan's echo of Lao Tzu,
and hundreds of years between. I love beyond words this quiet rain
in these trees, the rose
whose stark white blossom lasts only a day, this garden
in moonlight, and the woman
who sighs, worried in her dreams. about her sleepless paramour
who rises in the night
to smell the rain.

---“Summer Rain” by Sam Hamill, collected in “Almost Paradise: New Poems & Translations”

May have to do with that I'm a long way from home at work, and am thinking of my loves and my home. But more about that later.