POET'S PETARD FOR JANUARY 2023

In Which Rain Identifies Itself By Sound Not Song

We seem to be in rainy season once more. Rain as a season, not yet a climate. We are bewildered to recognize again the variety of voices It (Rain) has commandeered for Its personal use – and we might be excused for confusing “song” with “noise” at this very fundamental level, instead of the clearing of new space between sound and light.

​Here are a few samples of ways that poets are hearing rain. First, Thomas Merton, out of his forest solitude: (from 'Rain and the Rhinoceros'):

“The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. . . .What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges. . .everywhere in the hollows!

In eight two-line stanzas Donna Henderson winkles out a set of “only rain could do this” sounds. The poem ends only when she, like the rain, takes a deep breath. (from 'Much Raining'
in her collection Send Word):

 Rain like an audience listlessly clapping
Rain like handfuls of pea gravel pitched against glass

Rain like a woman wrapping presents in tissue
Rain like a child tearing into them late

Rain like the snap of rice spilled on Formica
Rain like the rumble of tires up a driveway

Rain like rooms full of angry fists, pounding on tables
And just when you think the rain won't end,
it doesn't.

​Here is Jorie Graham reaching into the silence when the rain does actually stop:
(from 'All' in the London Review of Books, 8/30/2018):

 After the rain stops you can hear the rained-on.
You hear oscillation, outflowing, slips.
The tipping-down of the branches, the down, the
exact weight of those drops that fell. . . .you

cannot not unfurl
endlessly, entirely, till it is the yes of blossom, that end
not end-- what does that sound sound like
deep in its own time where it roots us out. . . .

. . .The rain stopped. The perfect is not beauty.
Is not a finished thing. Is a making
of itself into more of itself, oozing and pressed
full force out of the not-having-been. . . .
and giving us that sound. We hear it

​Finally, a segment of my poem 'Rainproof' describing how the rain sounds in my study when it comes off the roof and slides its way through a jury-rigged arrangement of connecting gutter-pipes, distracting my attention just enough to allow me to mis-hear almost its entire journey as a protective covering for a song that could emerge no other way:

For three days
the rain in the downspout
gargles and burbles, burbles and gargles
                        until quick! I hear it skip into a human voice
            thin, and holding as a descant

I know immediately
            I cannot duplicate this clarity, cannot

tell other people “I sometimes hear the rain
in the downspout, not as rain. . .” I have no proof, no story