Sluice-rush

I wish I knew more about poetry.  I wish I had the composure and capacity to sit and read a volume of poetry, because I imagine that some erudite people do this.  I wish I could sit on my veranda and gaze out at the trees, looking down once and again to savor a phrase, a verse.  The fact is...I'm too manic to ponder for long and most of my quieting-down happens in the moments before sleep or when I am forcefully detained, such as in the dentist's chair yesterday, where I came upon a fabulous idea for a play.

At any rate, there are some poems that stay with me and I return to them countless times for inspiration and pleasure.  Reading Seamus Heaney's The Rain Stick is like having a piece of rich chocolate cake, or whatever food stuff causes fireworks to explode in your mouth.  It's like listening to your favorite music while someone massages your back.  It's a one-stop, all-you-can-eat buffet for the literally-minded. 

A word from it came to me this morning..."sluice."  See how Heaney has paired it with "rush."  Say this over and over; note context in poem; look up sluice at dictionary.com.  I promise you won't be disappointed.

Without further ado:

The Rain Stick

Seamus Heaney

Upend the rain stick and what happens next

Is a music that you never would have known

To listen for.  In a cactus stalk

Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash

Come flowing through.  You stand there like a pipe

Being played by water, you shake it again lightly

And diminuendo runs through all its scales

Like a gutter stopping trickling.  And now here comes

A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,

Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;

Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.

Upend the stick again.  What happens next

Is undiminished for having happened once,

Twice, ten, a thousand times before.

Who cares if all the music that transpires

Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?

You are like a rich man entering heaven

Through the ear of a raindrop.  Listen now again.