Tag: poetry

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.

“What am I to myself that must be remembered, insisted upon so often…”

Over and over in these blog posts, I look back to events in my life, trying to put my work and life into a context that makes sense. I am aware that I am insisting. I hearken back to Creeley’s poem, “The Rain,” because, like the speaker of the poem, I feel locked in some “final uneasiness.” I have had too much “intentional indifference”—that kind of willful professional distance that is meant to keep the ravages of freely ranging emotions at bay.

Creeley’s poem—tightly lined and sentenced—runs counter to the other great insistent poet in my life, Walt Whitman. Whitman’s Song of Myself insists stridently, and I wrote about the struggles my students face in the face of his relentlessness. I do not struggle. If anything, Whitman energizes me. His work reminds me that brio teetering on masculine bombast has its place. “Don’t restrain yourself, Brennan! Be all you are!” the poem declares. It urges me on.

“The Rain” does too.

Called between lyrical precision and unbridled energy, I find my balance in prose. I write fiction and nonfiction accepting the imperfections and imprecision, hoping that some meaning gets from here to an unknown there.

Besides I have been in the rain, under steady wet conditions on the ocean. I imagined myself as the “storm helm”—ready and able at the wheel in rough weather—when I sailed. I insisted on taking the wheel when the rain ran horizontally. I shooed my mates below decks while making way around Bermuda—from Hamilton to St. George—in hurricane wind. The local ferry even diverted course to check on us—it was not a day to be in the channel, but my father had a schedule. I kept us appointed.

Rain did not need to be as dramatic. Some stretches were just days long spirit flattening bouts of precipitation. Sailing did not have to be pleasant to feel necessary. Often, it was not. And yet, I felt called to it, in part by a commitment to my father, but also by the beauty of the ocean. Only onshore obligations kept me from finding further passages. Do I regret not having made them? Yes. Do I regret having kept my commitments? No.

Did the rain out there on the ocean wash away regret? Was I made clean? I wish it were entirely so. My experiences on the ocean are essential to the writer I have become, as all my experiences are. There are more salient lessons there though, if only because the lessons came with abrupt consequences. Life does not always have such clearly defined moments—it is more often like a day that is half-rain and half-sun. There is a reason that Thoreau calls life “quiet desperation”—it happens so silently that we do not even recognize the need.

Whitman—damned insistent Whitman—can loafe and still find original energy in that spear of summer grass.

I look skyward, into the rain.

Song: “When that I was and a little tiny boy (With hey, ho, the wind and the rain)”

By William Shakespeare

When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy,

For the rain it raineth every day.

 

But when I came to man’s estate,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,

For the rain it raineth every day.

 

But when I came, alas! to wive,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

By swaggering could I never thrive,

For the rain it raineth every day.

 

But when I came unto my beds,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

With toss-pots still had drunken heads,

For the rain it raineth every day.

 

A great while ago the world begun,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

But that’s all one, our play is done,

And we’ll strive to please you every day.

 

At the end of Twelfth Night, Feste sings and sums up life. It is a particularly British vision of life. One merely needs to visit England to realize that the rain does indeed “raineth every day.” Of course, Shakespeare does not mean only actual rain, but that virtually everpresent British rain is not the storm on the heath, not the “Howl! Howl! Howl!” It just comes every day—not as a reversal, just as a steady ubiquitous presence. “The rain it raineth every day.”

Shakespeare is another touchstone for me. His plays contain absolute reversals and despair—too often self-inflicted injuries, and injuries that harm not simply the self but the state of the world. Consequence abounds. I am drawn to consequence.

Even Feste, the fool, is consequential. He helps to shape the story; he guides Olivia. And then he leaves. I love Trevor Nunn’s framing of Feste—and Ben Kingsley’s portrayal—in no small part, because of how Feste commands the end of the play. Feste walks off and insists, “Every day,” directly to the audience. This is the fool’s job—to entertain every day, and more, always more. If there is rain every day, so too must there be entertainment.

And the writer is the fool. I have always felt that. There is more than something foolish about attempting to entertain, especially when the entertainment strives to do more than simply delight. Although, delight is enough at times—“Be wet with a decent happiness.” More. I want more, of course, I want more. I want exuberance and ecstasy, a sundering of all that we simply accept—that intentional indifference. “Creeds and schools in abeyance!”

It is no surprise that I have supplemented my writing life with creeds and schools. I was drawn to them to overturn them. I wanted to make those worlds bigger. I have given up on one part of that desire. I have realized that as far as the other, it will not be enough. It cannot be enough, as attractive and meaningful as being the teacher-fool can be—and how enchanting teaching can be (and it can be! Watching the lights go on in my students’ eyes is beyond satisfying). I have to be the writer-fool.

Every day has been the mantra of the work. In rain. In sun. In light. In dark. Even though I cannot see your eyes while you read, or hear your gasps while I read, I undertake this foolish, giddy task. I am not indifferent, no matter what the cost, and there is a cost to caring. The reward is uncertain. Success is a chimera. And yet. It rains.

The rain came to the book. My characters ran through it on their way to seek shelter. Or they walked on streets slick with rain. Yes, those streets were in London. The city waits for me to return. The rain was real and metaphorical, as all rain must be. It came through happiness and sadness, as it must. And so the rain, the same rain in Creeley’s poem, in Feste’s song, and that I brought with me from London and the ocean came here. It is the rain that returns as persistent as ever. Always.

If she still felt love for him, it had become the love that the universe holds for all creation—children running down hallways and rocks washed onto distant shores. It had become permanent and impersonal. Or so she had convinced herself, how long ago? It was a night when she stayed out while it rained. The water drenched her, and she felt it seep into her. She worried, with a wild anxiety, that she would melt, dissolve into the ground, and disappear. The fear of disappearing made her heart pound—it felt as if it was pulsing into the mud beneath her, propelling her life into the ground. She was becoming part of the land. The tears that she cried became part of the rain. Was she crying because she had lost him, or because she was lost? She did not know. The water and the ground opened a space for her.

She did not go into the earth. The rain stopped. Her tears stopped. Her heart settled back into her chest, where it pulsed life back through her, rejuvenating her nearly lost body. In the morning, she rose, whole, not forgetting his absence, but welcoming the world as it was.