Rain

Let me begin with the bloggers lament: No, scrap that. Here I am. Now. I've been waiting for Don Paterson's book to arrive. Rain. I talked about one of his poems from this collection a few weeks ago here but I cannot resist posting the complete version of the title poem. It needs, I believe, to be read aloud to hear the full cadence, the internal rhyme.Now, a few hours later, and much sweat, and no success, I post this poem. It's supposed to have spaces every fourth line but Wordpress takes them out regardless of what I do in CSS or HTML or anywhere else. If you know how to fix this please, please tell me.

Rain

I love all films that start with rain:rain, braiding a windowpaneor darkening a hung-out dressor streaming down her upturned face;one big thundering downpourright through the empty script and scorebefore the act, before the blame,before the lens pulls through the frameto where the woman sits alonebeside a silent telephoneor the dress lies ruined on the grassor the girl walks off the overpass,and all things flow out from that sourcealong their fatal watercourse.However bad or overlongsuch a film can do no wrong,so when his native twang shows throughor when the boom slips into viewor when her speech starts to betrayits adaptation from the play,I think to when we opened coldon a starlit gutter, running goldwith the neon of a drugstore signand I’d read into its blazing line:forget the ink, the milk, the blood –all was washed clean with the floodwe rose up from the falling watersthe fallen rain’s own sons and daughtersand none of this, none of this matters.Don Paterson, Rain. Farrar Straus Geroux, 2009Can I say: treat yourself. Section V from the poem Phantom is as close and as beautiful a description of our fate as anything I've ever read.