The Rain -- Robert Creeley

Guest poem submitted by Aseem Kaul:

(Poem #1665) The Rain 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 the 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. -- Robert Creeley

Every time I sit in my room watching the rain falling against the window,
letting my mind wander, this is the poem I'm most reminded of. I can't think
of a poem that captures more accurately that sense of floating restlessness
- the feeling that there is something deeply important to be deciphered out
of the gentle patter of the rain and the sight of the little droplets
trickling down the pane. How, in some way that you can't quite explain, the
rain is a metaphor for your life, the secret key to an uncertain happiness.
An emotion that is at once an overwhelming longing and the intuition of
beauty.

It's a truly exquisite poem - every line, every word sounds exactly right,
yet the overall thought is fragmented, barely hinted at. There's a sense of
earnest questioning here ("what am I to myself / that must be remembered /
insisted upon / so often?") but also an instinctive knowledge of what
happiness would feel like or how it could be brought about ("Love, if you
love me / lie next to me").

Robert Creeley died last Wednesday (30th March 2005). As I think about his
legacy, there's much in the write-ups that accompany his other poems on
Minstrels (Poem #552, Poem #1400) that I find myself agreeing with. What
will always make Creeley special to me, though, is his ability to "be, for
me, like rain / the getting out // of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the
semi-/ lust of intentional indifference.". His ability, in short, to "be wet
/ with a decent happiness."

Aseem.