IN POETRY: The Rain in October
by Wally Swist
Wally Swist makes his home in South Amherst, Massachusetts. His books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012); The Daodejing: A New Interpretation, with David Breeden and Steven Schroeder (Lamar University Press, 2015); Invocation (Lamar University Press, 2015), and The Windbreak Pine (Snapshot Press, 2016). Forthcoming books include The View of the River (Kelsay Books, 2017), Candling the Eggs (Shanti Arts, LLC, 2017), and Singing for Nothing from Street to Street: Selected Nonfiction as Literary Memoir (The Operating System, 2018). wswist@yahoo.com
Wally Swist makes his home in South Amherst, Massachusetts. His books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012); The Daodejing: A New Interpretation, with David Breeden and Steven Schroeder (Lamar University Press, 2015); Invocation (Lamar University Press, 2015), and The Windbreak Pine (Snapshot Press, 2016). Forthcoming books include The View of the River (Kelsay Books, 2017), Candling the Eggs (Shanti Arts, LLC, 2017), and Singing for Nothing from Street to Street: Selected Nonfiction as Literary Memoir (The Operating System, 2018). wswist@yahoo.com
The rain all night, lifting by morning, suffusing the gray
light with silver, and tinting my recollections of other years,
wanting to pry behind what it is that was relevant then
as it is pertinent now, the calling within all of that, the rain
beginning again, lightly, the glistening in that and what is
just beneath that which is what causes me to pause, looking
out at the meadow of Queen-Anne’s lace browning to umber,
becoming itself its own sepia photograph, and my walking
back in the misting rain, marveling at just this, this moment
of this day, this rolling of drops of rain across the leaves of
honeysuckle in the windbreak, the bittersweet’s beaded
yellow berries, the gilded ochre inflorescence of goldenrod,
the vibrancy even in the waning of that moment becoming
another, rising mist dissolving over the pasture across
the road, the acrid odor of wood smoke, the astonishment in
a candelabra of rain glittering in the pink hydrangea’s late bloom.
light with silver, and tinting my recollections of other years,
wanting to pry behind what it is that was relevant then
as it is pertinent now, the calling within all of that, the rain
beginning again, lightly, the glistening in that and what is
just beneath that which is what causes me to pause, looking
out at the meadow of Queen-Anne’s lace browning to umber,
becoming itself its own sepia photograph, and my walking
back in the misting rain, marveling at just this, this moment
of this day, this rolling of drops of rain across the leaves of
honeysuckle in the windbreak, the bittersweet’s beaded
yellow berries, the gilded ochre inflorescence of goldenrod,
the vibrancy even in the waning of that moment becoming
another, rising mist dissolving over the pasture across
the road, the acrid odor of wood smoke, the astonishment in
a candelabra of rain glittering in the pink hydrangea’s late bloom.
