42 Rain poems

Under the trees, where everything Is still possible in prescribed doses: Hundreds of accordion-like units Without edges. But there is no unwinding Of minutes to stay the execution Of a rain-shot weekend in early Beach weather, no elixir To revive the amputated flower Still kicking on its ghost-stem In a bowl of water, no direction In which to steer The hapless, puzzled out-of-towner Other than straight ahead, To the sheer drop-off Where his guidebook gutters Or deposits him, addressless, In thin air.

Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle in its ghost-part when the bark slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there. When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air drop its motes to the patch-thick slopes of snow. Tiny blinkings of ice from the oak, a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy owl it carries. Some feel sunlight well up in blood-vessels below the skin and wish there had been less to lose. Knowing how it could have been, pale maples drowsing like a second sleep above our temperaments. Do I imagine there is any place so safe it can’t be snapped? Some feel the rivers shift, blue veins through soil, as if the smokestacks were a long dream of exhalation. The lynx lets its paws skim the ground in snow and showers. The wildflowers scatter in warm tints until the second they are plucked. You can wait to scrape the ankle-burrs, you can wait until Mercury the early star underdraws the night and its blackest districts. And wonder. Why others feel through coal-thick night that deeply colored garnet star. Why sparring and pins are all you have. Why the earth cannot make its way towards you.

It is the story of the falling rain to turn into a leaf and fall again it is the secret of a summer shower to steal the light and hide it in a flower and every flower a tiny tributary that from the ground flows green and momentary is one of water's wishes and this tale hangs in a seed-head smaller than my thumbnail if only I a passerby could pass as clear as water through a plume of grass to find the sunlight hidden at the tip turning to seed a kind of lifting rain drip then I might know like water how to balance the weight of hope against the light of patience water which is so raw so earthy-strong and lurks in cast-iron tanks and leaks along drawn under gravity towards my tongue to cool and fill the pipe-work of this song which is the story of the falling rain that rises to the light and falls again

A lexicon of words that were not said in childhood, and all of those that were, were said beside an upturned boat, lapped planking of the creosoted shed, were said into the wind on tussocky ground, by farm-rust vehicles. The buildings I could not complete without my father’s help, the wind in which I was at sea. Rain blooming in August that moved the land and over land toward the autumn, sliding through the gates of summer, feeling for the bone inside the wrist.

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me Remembering again that I shall die And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks For washing me cleaner than I have been Since I was born into solitude. Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon: But here I pray that none whom once I loved Is dying tonight or lying still awake Solitary, listening to the rain, Either in pain or thus in sympathy Helpless among the living and the dead, Like a cold water among broken reeds, Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff, Like me who have no love which this wild rain Has not dissolved except the love of death, If love it be towards what is perfect and Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

The rain, in the backyard where I watch it fall, comes down at different 
rates. In the center a fine discontinuous curtain — or network — falls implacably and yet gently in drops that are probably quite light; a strengthless sempiternal precipitation, an intense fraction of the atmosphere at its purest. A little distance from the walls to the right and left plunk heavier drops, one by one. Here they seem about the size of grains of wheat, the size of a pea, while elsewhere they are big as marbles. Along gutters and window frames the rain runs horizontally, while depending from the same obstacles it hangs like individually wrapped candies. Along the entire surface of a little zinc roof under my eyes it trickles in a very thin sheet, a moiré pattern formed by the varying currents created by the imperceptible bumps and undulations of the surface. From the gutter it flows with the restraint of a shallow creek until it tumbles out into a perfectly vertical net, rather imperfectly braided, all the way to the ground where it breaks and sparkles into brilliant needles. Each of its forms has its particular allure and corresponds to a particular patter. Together they share the intensity of a complex mechanism 
as precise as it is dangerous, like a steam-powered clock whose spring is wound by the force of the precipitation. The ringing on the ground of the vertical trickles, the glug-glug of the gutters, the miniscule strikes of the gong multiply and resonate all at once in a concert without monotony, and not without a certain delicacy. Once the spring unwinds itself certain wheels go on turning for a while, more and more slowly, until the whole mechanism comes to a stop. It all vanishes with the sun: when it finally reappears, the brilliant apparatus evaporates. It has rained. Translated from the French

Toward evening, as the light failed and the pear tree at my window darkened, I put down my book and stood at the open door, the first raindrops gusting in the eaves, a smell of wet clay in the wind. Sixty years ago, lying beside my father, half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain drummed against our tent, I heard for the first time a loon’s sudden wail drifting across that remote lake— a loneliness like no other, though what I heard as inconsolable may have been only the sound of something untamed and nameless singing itself to the wilderness around it and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father and of good companions gone into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain and the soft lapping of water, and did not know whether it was grief or joy or something other that surged against my heart and held me listening there so long and late.

With thick strokes of ink the sky fills with rain. Pretending to run for cover but secretly praying for more rain. Over the echo of the water, I hear a voice saying my name. No one in the city moves under the quick sightless rain. The pages of my notebook soak, then curl. I’ve written: “Yogis opened their mouths for hours to drink the rain.” The sky is a bowl of dark water, rinsing your face. The window trembles; liquid glass could shatter into rain. I am a dark bowl, waiting to be filled. If I open my mouth now, I could drown in the rain. I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me. The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.

We had gathered under a tent in the park for some words before lunch and after separate mornings, and when—twice—the poet said “capital,” the lightning bolts that followed the noun had me bolting too; I’d always suspected God’s communist leanings, but now I regretted how few exchanges we know between craft and climate: imagine a rhyme inciting a rainbow, blood feuds bruising the sky, hymns of forgiveness bringing a soft new light to the faces watching the last act, waltzes and songs and declamations— this would be capital entertainment!— locked in a clinch with open air. But the lightning was as quick as it was loud. The clouds dispersed, and then so did the crowd.

It may be as close as an old man in Michigan comes to the sound of the sea. Call it thunder if you want, but it’s not thunder, not at all. It’s more like the rush of semis on a freeway somewhere between Bay City and Flint, the road a son will take when he learns, sometime around the last taste of a strap, that the life he was born to is nothing at all like a life he’d ever bother to live. There’s an anger in it, a tin-edged constancy that has no rhythm, quite, something more like white noise that still won’t let you sleep. Think of some man, needing to get a crop in, but the fields are sop, so he’s trying to find something to fix, something to keep his hands working, something to weld, something to pound, something to wrap his calloused palms around that might do less damage than a lead-rope knotted and tossed over the limb of a tree. If you ever decide to lose your years by working this land, you might think again, about the barn you build, or roofing it with tin.