A toadstool lets go of its spores, the spores rise, and eventually a raindrop forms around one of them. That small loop of fungus, tree and weather is the "true fable" at the center of Dave Bonta's "Rainiac," and the poem builds a whole way of paying attention around it. Its opening claim, "In the house of rain, all are kin," is meant almost literally. If the toadstool helps make the rain that feeds the toadstool, then fungus, tree and cloud are relatives.
The title is a coinage. "Rainiac" sounds like "maniac," which suggests someone a little obsessed with rain. The speaker's own behavior fits. He trudges through a downpour and recites an ecological fact to himself like a charm. The phrase "true fable" holds the poem's double aim, since fables teach through story and this one happens to be scientifically accurate. Knowledge and wonder are treated as one thing here.
The form helps. Nothing rhymes, and there is no regular meter. Instead the poem moves like a notebook entry, in prose paragraphs of very different lengths. The first is long and explanatory. Then comes a three-line verse that looks like a haiku, though it doesn't keep to a strict syllable count: "that scent / of wet rhododendrons— / Pop-pop's place." The abrupt shift from atmospheric science to a grandfather's house is the emotional hinge of the poem. A smell carries the speaker somewhere private, and it quietly gives "kin" a human meaning. Family and ecosystem turn out to be the same idea at different scales.
After that the sentences shrink to flat, almost teenage statements: "I like how the world is textured." A fragment follows, "Visually and aurally and in food webs and ecological niches," in which the senses and the sciences sit side by side in one breathless list. Then comes the comparison to "the best rave ever." The joke deflates any solemnity, but it also fits. A rave is dense, rhythmic and immersive, and the rain-soaked forest is described the same way. The poem takes delight seriously without taking itself too seriously.
The central line is "Understanding begins with listening," and the longest paragraph acts it out. What the speaker hears is "a mosquito's singular need, crickets calling for a mate, a truck jake-breaking down a steep grade," and a jet's "dull eraser." The animal sounds are all forms of wanting, while the machines are mechanical or erasing, and yet they sit in the same sentence. The speaker doesn't filter out the human noise. His own "steady rhythm" of footsteps joins the list too, as the one sound he contributes. Then comes the conditional that matters most: "All this can be music if I let it." Beauty depends on a choice of attention, not on the quality of the sound. The phrase "descending a different mountain than my own" hints that he is a visitor here, and listening is how a visitor starts to belong.
Even his confidence is hedged. "Whatever i tell myself, it's never enough" admits that facts can't finish the job. Twice the pronoun appears in lowercase, which may be accidental, but the effect, judging by the context, is of a self shrinking a little into its surroundings. The bird entry works the same way: "Nuthatch, chickadee. Are the winter flocks already beginning to form?" The names are bare, and the question is a real one. This is the kind of noticing that precedes knowing.
The ending refuses a grand epiphany. Thunder arrives, the speaker scrambles for his poncho, and the rain becomes "a rather over enthusiastic masseuse." Earlier the rain "comes knocking" like a neighbor, and now it touches him. The comic simile keeps the closeness while dropping the solemnity, and it is still part of the kinship.
What makes "Rainiac" worth reading is its modesty. It suggests that ecological knowledge is a form of intimacy, that memory and science can share a paragraph, and that attention is something you practice, in the middle of a storm, with a wet pack and a poncho.