Silenced Press (silencedpress.com), a journal and small literary press, has just accepted The Art of Raining for their online publication. Please check them out! I adore the quote prefacing this poem, a single line amidst the chaos of Pablo Neruda's intelligent and oft big-headed memoir. I still cannot confine with definition 'the art of raining', cannot build walls around or perspective upon a concept as fluid as the metaphor within it, but it yawns and stretches within me back to childhood, through the future, seeming to connect every memory I cherish and every memory I fear...the art of raining...something we cannot lose...
The Art of Raining
“The art of raining…has now been lost.”
-Pablo Neruda, Memoirs
I walked blindly into her hands,
the sea somewhere behind me,
asking why.
What fire, wind, and rain
has chosen to leave standing
and the ferocity of the vanished’s
returning, often in conversations silenced
over vast tablefuls of food and friends,
that moment all consent to mass introspection,
often too in bullet casings, polished silver,
lodged in the lung of endless answer-waiting,
when extraction could shut down the whole system.
Once we spoke the unspeakable, but no longer.
Is this the belief she whispers to my sleep, as if from Isla Negra?
That somehow tears are wine if we admit our weeping?
The sky over the sea, blindly eyeing my back,
storms and calms and wonders
why our countless words for rain.
To it there is one, synonymous with love,
and one for love, synonymous with why,
and one for why, synonymous with rain.
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