Poetry / You, in the Rain
Sleep stifles the world as damp mists rise—
raindrops like their own filigree
to concrete and wet tar.
Streetlamps shed light in tawny manes,
somewhere in London,
and pigeons coast through the flexing waves of light
like orange-juice dimensions.
Once, when I was in London
(and I saw you there, a poet
laced with faeries and rose gardens),
I rode what they called the “tube”
to Trafalgar Square.
There was a red-haired woman there
sleeping on the floor, her back against the escalator’s
cool, humming side. Her face was a pale galaxy,
freckles like constellations stretched across
chalky cheeks, lips drained of all their color.
I read my horoscope in those fading sun-spots
and pressed my empty hands against my sides.
Later, in New York,
I was writing sonnets to the sepia children
who were drenched in amber-scented rain
in the photograph exhibit of Tibet
(it was Tibet, I think,
with horizontal faces and calm splendor in shut eyes)
when I saw you again, smiling.
You had four arms and they hugged each other
and I watched you with green longing
and sweet, bubble-wrapped elation.
Rain shattered on wet sidewalks.
On a day like wet eczema
in too-hot, too-humid Florida
I begged the skies for rain
as hot gusts whipped across my face.
Nothing fell. Maybe I rained myself—
sweat gushing down my sides, like the sun was melting me—
but you stared straight ahead, and smiled,
and did not notice.
In New York the air is glazed
like honey-roasted peanuts.
Buildings lean against each other like Roman numerals ‘round a clock—
Xs, the glass skyscrapers, groaning into me. I am the I.
And pastel streets collide beneath pedestrians, buzzing with taxis,
splashing cool rain-water on parched limbs and hands.
You are in the limo,
windows tinted so I can’t see in.
Somewhere, I imagine,
you must be out at sea
and graying skies are fraying into
a light scattering of rain.
Your eyes will open into
a shaking leprous morning,
mist hung like silver scarves on your cold-pricked nimble limbs.
I know your eyes:
hazel and
citrus-sliced
into red blood-orange sections.
Somewhere in Paris it is raining
and the Eiffel Tower is blue with cold.
Pink umbrellas bob beneath its bridges
like a canvas canopy; like orchids.
You told me once that you loved the rain.
That you loved to watch it fall. (I did not ask you about the mornings
when drowned worms float across fat puddles
and oxygen is humid in the headlight-tumbled dark.)
I could stand in this shower and imagine you here—
dropping kisses on my shoulders, like terra cotta rain.
I, like a flash flood, spilling past my grainy banks.
But mechanical water stings cold skin
and does not kiss rainbows from hot suns—it simply clinks against
the dip of oily porcelain. Bubbles in this tub
would drown our feet in froth.
And what is rain? And what are you?
And why do you both forever fall?
Oh, I try to capture these squat drops
but I only get my hands wet.
I had a coin for that woman in the station.
I could have paid her for my fortune.
But tight rains squeezed my sick heart dry
and golden showers fizzled in my pocket.
A drought stole the color from her lips.
(That night in the shower my eyes began to rain
and I cut red drizzles from my skin.
I felt like I was Moses—turning the Nile into blood.)
How many children are in Tibet? How many could I save?
But I rain these words like a thunderstorm,
far too overdone. I could save them, I could drown them
or I could simply drain away
and crash down broken gutters, and crash
and no one would remember my name.
I see the world through words—
prisms which split everything around me
into a rain-blurred bow of colors.
Creation is a point of view.
Red always existed in sunlight.
But there are always things I cannot understand
and what are you, and what is rain?
How exactly do you fall?
I could watch these drops for hours—
see spears and gauzes, glass beads and soaked pearls
hear angels and pounding and hums.
Hymns. I could saturate myself with rain—
but its name, and yours, is lost to me.
But the rain, the action and existence of rain—
erasing mountainsides,
dredging sand from beaches, stealing
atoms from my skin, eroding
spoiled soil, and only spreading, in return,
rust on copper statues—
is preserved. I watch it fall.
Every second,
someone dies.
I watch the rain.
I see the world through words.
You are pigeons and coasts and lighthouses in Maine—
nutmeg and ginger and cinnamon sticks.
You are corn-husks and pecans and asteroid belts;
you are the drops of rain I can never catch.
You flood me, you distort me
and I am drowning in you, flailing,
unwilling to be rescued.
I am Ophelia, throwing myself in the water.
You are my soaked destruction.
I cannot understand you.
Oh, I could be a scientist,
and dissect things to their atoms.
I could prise you apart, if I wanted.
But everything gets smaller and smaller
and I would never reach the end of it.
There is a limited, infinite
number of atoms. None lost, none created—
but we cannot count that high.
I could not count to two,
I could not count to you.
I did not know what I wanted you to do.
Perhaps you could have saved me,
perhaps I could have salvaged you.
Perhaps, perhaps, there was nothing we could do.
I am well aware that rain
raises flowers from the gardens. I know the tulip bulbs.
I know of leaping into puddles and asphalt waxed with dew,
grass glinting like growing glass.
I know that you love the rain;
I know that I love you.
How could I see you when you walked by me,
with the rain fogging up my glasses?
I leaped past you into cinnamon splashes,
shoes and skin soaked through.
Tree branches shushed the wind.
Maybe one day I will find you in Athens,
and we will eat olives from the trees
as rain sketches golden gods in the sunrays striding past us.
But will I ever understand
how the rain and you both fall?
Or are these words just shower-water:
mechanical and false.
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This 433 word review has not been unlocked.
Wow…are you really fifteen? No, seriously: are you fifteen?
I became interested in your work because you, so thoughtfully, reviewed my Eyes story…so I thought I’d give your stuff a ganders…
I wish I more more into poetry so that I could give you a better review. Sorry. But, you are so careful and clever with your words…you are truly delicious (if I may say to a 15-yr-old). I am really impressed with the sophistication of your work, not only because of your age, but because your style and subject matter are compelling. You are on my “favorite authors” list.
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