Rhinocerous rain

Driving north out of Nashville,

traffic thickens to a slow confession

near Fort Campbell, brake lights bloom

like votive candles stretching out into Kentucky.

I think of Thomas Merton, cloistered

among the knobs and forests of Gethsemani Monastery.

Where silence became a discipline.

Prayer was not an escape, but another way of entering the world.

He wrote of nature, rain and rhinoceroses,

laughed at certainty, disturbed the Vatican,

angered the CIA, a monk armed only with contemplation

might prove more dangerous than generals with maps.

The highway opens, then closes again.

Afternoon sun gilds distant clouds,

edges bright as cathedral windows,

while nearer the sky stacked into dark towers,

high-top tables abandoned after happy hour,

their surfaces slick with spilled conversations,

beer-colored light running down the legs of heaven.

My GPS interrupts with the practiced calm of prophecy:

“Lightning ahead. Torrential rain. Damaging winds. Hail.”

I tighten my grip on the steering wheel,

tempted by an old religion to prove something to myself,

I drive harder, faster, through weather that owes me nothing.

But caution is sometimes the greater courage.

so I take the next exit. A small-town coffee shop receives me

without questions. A bell above the door offers a brief amen.

Fresh grounds, warm milk, quiet percussion on the roof.

Outside, rain speaks its ancient liturgy

against windows, gutters, parked trucks, the empty sidewalk.

Prayer steam rises from my cup

I Google Thomas Merton on my phone.

His words arrive as though they had been waiting

in the storm for me to sit at this very table.

“Forests and fields, sun and wind and sky,

earth and water, all speak the same language:

peace, solitude, silence.”

Beyond the glass, the storm refuses translation.

Then another sentence:

“Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it.

It will talk as long as it wants, this rain.

As long as it talks I am going to listen.”

So I listen to the rain on the roof,

tires hissing along the flooded street.

Miles behind me, miles ahead,

traffic surrenders its impatience,

while clouds resolve their argument with the earth.

A monastery was never meant to be

stone walls to isolate the soul.

Perhaps it is where false valor pulls off the highway,

where fear sets down its luggage,

where a stranger wraps cold hands around a warm cup

and hears creation speaking without raising its voice.

When the rain grew tired of telling its story,

clouds moved east, making room for the evening.

I returned to the road, merged into traffic,

not having conquered the storm,

only having listened long enough to discover

that peace is sometimes nothing more

than taking the next exit when wisdom tells you,

and to carry that silence the rest of the way home.

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