Rain

It's raining here in LA. It's so lovely when it does, and unlike anywhere else I've lived it also comes with the anticipation of lovely days following. The rain here clears all the air, smoke, smog, fog, clouds away, and usually the next day is pristine. It's then I love driving by the hills and seeing all the houses tucked in their greenery; seeing the ring of mountains looking out over Glendale from the Hyperion bridge. Everything feels at once close and expansive and so clear. I love those days.

But for today, it's this beautiful rain. The hills get very green and misty the longer it rains, and it feels like you're in Costa Rica. Last winter, they were so green it was like Ireland (but only for a moment). The grass is so vibrant, though, and it reminds me of why I love rain so much.

In honor of that (and to negate my earlier poetry rejection post when I was slightly crabby about free verse), I'm posting my favorite poem with rain in it. I heard it first in "Hannah and her Sisters", and at one point started cutting out letters to make a collage of it on my home wall in college (like the previous word wall post). That never happened. I do love the poem, though.

Here it is in the Woody Allen movie.



You can skip to 6:16, but this clip has some great stuff, including the best line (I hate April. She's pushy.) and the old Pagaent book shop which is sadly now a restaurant. It's a beautiful, gray New York. Durn, I love this movie.

Anyhow, I digress. For now, the truly luscious e.e. cummings poem:


somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, misteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands