Friday, September 21, 2007

18. CREELEY'S RAIN

From the Archives

(Marh 2005) Here’s a nice rain poem.... No, wait, I better go upstairs and find it instead of trying to write it from memory, so I don’t leave out some crucial line. Hold on.

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.

Robert Creeley is just cool. He dropped out of Harvard to try subsistence farming, then started the Black Mountain Review, an influential journal associated with NC’s Black Mountain School of Poetry. Most of his poems explore love and the emotions that accompany intimacy in a vigilantly minimalist fashion. Like Allen Ginsburg, Frank O’Hara, Robert Lowell, and numerous other poets, Creeley insists that “you can write directly from what you feel”—a radical notion once upon a time.

All right. And since I’m up in my office staring at essays that I should be grading, I believe I will instead dig around on my shelves and see if I can find another rain poem for this rainy Tuesday morning.

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