It wants to rain. It wants
the sudden surgery of lightning
aimed into its aerial aqueous
pain, to be sliced and pour

its ice-cold silver distillate
out on the sensate shore, out
of long suspense, out of its wide
Pacific silence, onto our face.

It wants to dispense
with itself, to bleed its colorless
life out of the light, to undress
down to nothingness. Presence

calls for this—to fall
upon a place, to splash and shake
the leaves, to sink beneath
the trodden darkness, deep

enough to meet and enter
the forest of roots, to become
part of the flesh of the fruit some soldier
or child will eat. It wants

to rain itself out of and into
existence. It can’t remain
what it is. We can raise our face
into its torrent of disappearance.