pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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RAIN AND HAIL AND PUDDLES, O MY!

19.

(6:30 AM Tuesday) I am sitting on my sofa drinking decaf (sigh) and listening to the rain. Unless it stops, Fiddlergrrl and I will be changing our plans for this evening.

Slept eight luxurious hours last night, then settled into a lengthy session of stretches and catas.

Meanwhile, here's a nice rain poem.... No, wait, I better go upstairs and find it instead of trying to recite it from memory, so that I don't leave out some crucial line. Hold on.

THE RAIN

by Robert Creeley

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon,
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out
of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

Wet with a decent happiness. That Robert Creeley is one cool dude.

Creeley dropped out of Harvard to try subsistence farming, then started the Black Mountain Review, an influential journal associated with North Carolina's Black Mountain School of Poetry. Most of his poems explore love and the emotions that accompany intimacy and they do so in a vigilantly minimalist fashion.

Like Allen Ginsburg, Frank O'Hara, Robert Lowell, Marilyn Hacker, and numerous other poets, Creeley insists that "you can write directly from what you feel"—a radical notion once upon a time.

Okay. Since I am in my home office now staring at a tack of Martha Stewart Living magazines that I am turning into a domestic found poem series, I'll dig out another favorite rain poem that is less stilted.

This one was published in The Sun magazine:

LULLABY

by D. Patrick Miller

I am not a body. I am the rain,
falling all over your house and
in the deep fold of the distant hills.
I cover the leaf, the roof, the field grasses
and the shiny street. A billowing wind
carries me through the swirling branches
and drives me against your window.
I strike and coalesce, fall and spill
into the soil and the swallowing gutter,
taking a wild ride to the sea.
Later the sun may draw me up,
but the clouds will lose me when
they let down their burden of water
again. I am not a body. You can
sleep to the sound of my falling.

And now I will go stand in the rain and smoke a cigarette, since I seem to be doing that these days.

Finally, I decided to add a new category to my morning entries: Singing in The Shower.

I'll try to be honest, but sometimes an incredibly goofy song just presents itself as I'm reaching for the shampoo and, well, if Undercover Angel ever pops out of my mouth, then I may just have to lie that day.

SINGING IN THE SHOWER: Bonnie Raitt's Angel from Montgomery

READING: Olga Broumas poems

LISTENING TO: the rain

9:53 a.m. - 2005-03-08

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