Readers Write: Rain

I have heard that after a monumental rain inordinate amounts of poetry about rain are written then submitted to literary magazines. Whether or not this is true, I am, of course, guilty of writing a post-downpour poem or two.

For years, I have been trying to pen-capture the night I ran down my block chasing after a deer I had been watching from my front porch during a hard summer's rain. Her glistening hide. The deafness of the night beneath the metronome of rain. Orange glow of the streetlights.

Stanza after paragraph, revision after revision, each draft felt like an insult to the EXPERIENCE I had had that night. My precious memory, that wonderful, half forgotten dream, was continuously wasted on my trying words. Ballads, prose, short non-fiction, sestina, and conceit could not satisfy the images and feelings I held so dearly of that night.

I was reminded of the old adage, write what you know. I thought I knew about the doe leaping across my neighbors front lawn, my barefeet unevenly hitting the wet pavement as I chased after her, the succulent smell of rain and grass, and summer.

But in my writing it was if it had happened to someone else, or was in fact fiction, bad fiction. I was tortured, how could I be so incapable of telling my own story. Who was I, if not that rain-soaked girl running madly down the street in the dead of night. But, now as I sit on my porch, silenced by one of those epic Midwestern thunderstorms, waiting to catch a glimpse of my spindle legged deer, perhaps what matters is beyond the text. I was there, rain sliding off my cheeks, breathing happily in the midst of a warm city night. And that’s all I’ll ever need to know.