I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face …
(from Rain, Don Paterson)
And rain was rainier for being blown
Across the grid and texture of the concrete.
(from Lightenings, Seamus Heaney)
Hidden, oh hidden
in the high fog
the house we live in,
beneath the magnetic rock,
rain-, rainbow-ridden,
where blood-black
bromelias, lichens,
owls, and the lint
of the waterfalls cling,
familiar, unbidden.
(from Song for the Rainy Season, Elizabeth Bishop)
The rain, its tiny pressure
on your scalp, like ants
passing the door of a tobacconist.
(from Romanze, or The Music Students, Frank O’Hara)
We only imagine it ends
like childhood, or rain:
fever, the purl in the bone, the amended
lustre of the self, all shell and glitter …
(from The Body as Metaphor, John Burnside)
She thought the distance smelled of rain and lightning.
(from The Black Lace Fan my Mother Gave me, Eavan Boland)
I have put a blockade on high-mindedness.
All night, through dawn and mid-morning,
Rain is playing rimshots on a bucket in the yard.
The weatherman tells me that winter comes on
As if he’d invented it. Fuck him.
(from After Laforgue, Sean O’Brien)
Oh I could go on …
