Until Now
by Jennifer Wallace
Jennifer Wallace lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and Shutesbury, Massachusetts. She teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and is a poetry editor at The Cortland Review and a founding editor of Toadlily Press. Her poems, essays, and photographs have appeared in artists’ books, exhibition catalogs, galleries, museums, anthologies and literary journals. Her fourth poetry collection, The Want Fire, was published by Passager Books in 2015.
for Shay Whitman Cooper
Until now I have not been asked to look
for the rain that is no longer here, the rain--
booming and electric—that pummeled
the blueberries last night, bent the ferns;
that hours before bounced off the stone wall
and into the gravel ditch below the pine. The rain
that by now has become a wavy vapor somewhere near.
And though I consider myself mostly sensitive
to worlds not in front of my nose, and wishing
to impress my new friend with likable aspects of myself,
I couldn’t admit my failure when she so delicately asked:
“Do you see last night’s rain?”
In “rain years,” she’s obviously more experienced than me.
I’ll bet she can see straight into a rain drop’s core
and out again to its gathering source. Until now,
I haven’t thought at all about a rain that’s passed,
much less that it could be found. Who even thinks
about such things? Maybe a shaman interviewed by a Ph.D.
We drove to the trailhead and, as casually as asking
what I’d like for lunch, she brought me
to where the world is new, washed eternally
in the unfindable and everywhere rain.
Jennifer Wallace lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and Shutesbury, Massachusetts. She teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and is a poetry editor at The Cortland Review and a founding editor of Toadlily Press. Her poems, essays, and photographs have appeared in artists’ books, exhibition catalogs, galleries, museums, anthologies and literary journals. Her fourth poetry collection, The Want Fire, was published by Passager Books in 2015.
for Shay Whitman Cooper
Until now I have not been asked to look
for the rain that is no longer here, the rain--
booming and electric—that pummeled
the blueberries last night, bent the ferns;
that hours before bounced off the stone wall
and into the gravel ditch below the pine. The rain
that by now has become a wavy vapor somewhere near.
And though I consider myself mostly sensitive
to worlds not in front of my nose, and wishing
to impress my new friend with likable aspects of myself,
I couldn’t admit my failure when she so delicately asked:
“Do you see last night’s rain?”
In “rain years,” she’s obviously more experienced than me.
I’ll bet she can see straight into a rain drop’s core
and out again to its gathering source. Until now,
I haven’t thought at all about a rain that’s passed,
much less that it could be found. Who even thinks
about such things? Maybe a shaman interviewed by a Ph.D.
We drove to the trailhead and, as casually as asking
what I’d like for lunch, she brought me
to where the world is new, washed eternally
in the unfindable and everywhere rain.
