"Rain has forsaken us." The poem opens with a verb that belongs to scripture and abandoned lovers, not weather reports. Rain is treated as something that has turned its back, and the speaker is left with an effort that cannot succeed: "However much water I give my gardens, it still isn't enough." The central idea is the helplessness of a person who has done everything right. Watering, the one tool a gardener has, runs out, and what remains is a wish, quietly and almost shyly offered to the earth.
The prose paragraph is built from plain, short sentences that pile up like failed crops. "Tomato and squash vines wilt. Corn leaves curl." The verbs are small and physical, and the hard *c* and *l* sounds in "corn leaves curl" make the line crackle like dry foliage. Then comes the most telling verb: the potatoes "gave up altogether." Giving up is a human act, so the plants seem to lose heart along with the gardener. The result, "a half-sized harvest," is stated flatly, without self-pity. There is no rhyme and no regular metre here. The rhythm is that of someone talking, and the understatement makes the loss feel real.
The Midas comparison is the paragraph's turning point. Midas, in the myth, turns everything he touches to gold and is ruined by abundance. The speaker is "the opposite": everything he touches "turns to dust." The joke is wry, but it also suggests guilt, as if the drought were his own failing touch. The word "dust" also carries an echo of the old burial phrase "dust to dust," though that is my reading rather than something the poem says. The tone shifts here from reporting to feeling.
Next comes the odd, lovely wish. The speaker will "keep it secret even from myself," a paradox that feels true. Some hopes are too large or too fragile to look at directly. Then the poem turns surreal: he will "carry it back to earth's ear in a bucket." The bucket is the gardener's ordinary tool for hauling water, but this time it holds something that cannot be poured. The earth is given an ear, so the relationship changes from owner and land to petitioner and listener. The long, slow sentence, with its soft *s* sounds in "secret even from myself," works like a whisper after the clipped sentences before it.
The closing three lines, set apart like a haiku, change scale and speed:
*sinkholy / fields resting on straw- / thin stalactites*
"Sinkholy" looks like a coinage that fuses "sinkhole" with "holy," so the ground seems to be both collapsing and sacred. This fits the earlier language of forsaking and wishing. Stalactites are formed by dripping water over a very long time, so the image shows water only as a slow, mineral trace. The fields "rest" on them, which sounds peaceful but is alarming, since a field propped on stalactites "straw-thin" has almost no support. The line break splits "straw-" from "thin," so the word itself seems to stretch and narrow. The poem moves from one person's vegetable beds to a whole landscape, and from the surface to what lies underneath. The prose-then-short-verse pairing recalls the haibun tradition, though the poem does not follow strict syllable counts.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. It never uses the word "climate" or argues about causes. It simply shows one gardener's season of failure, which makes it easy for a reader to believe. The humour of Midas keeps it from becoming sentimental, and the final image makes the problem larger than any one plot of land. Its quiet suggestion is that when practical effort reaches its limit, attention and humility are what remain. The speaker cannot make it rain, but he can listen to the ground and speak to it in his own way, and the poem presents that as a small but real kind of faithfulness.