Rain
, is now available for pre-order, which means we don’t have to wait too much longer. (If you have time to kill between now and then, may I recommend Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis
?)
“Rain,” coming to a bookshelf near me, April 2015
, is now available for pre-order, which means we don’t have to wait too much longer. (If you have time to kill between now and then, may I recommend Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis?)
Sounds very interesting! Looking forward to it. And I can’t help but think of a couple of prose poems by a favorite writer of mine – David Shumate here is one from his collection “High Water Mark.”
The Rain
I suppose after the heavens and the earth I too would have
created Adam and Eve. Or some pair of innocents like them.
The first food would have been grapes, and of those they
could have partaken freely. I would have bestowed on them a
sense of humor and encouraged practical jokes. I would have
let them learn about procreation on their own and practice it
without shame. When they had a dozen children or so, when
their hair had turned to gray, I would have shown them the
way out to the sea. They could have traveled there often and
written about it to their children’s children. Some of their
letters might have survived and these would be holy texts. Who
knows? With a few small changes, things might be different
today. But the rain . . . The rain . . . Now that was truly
inspired. I would never have thought of that. Not in a million
years.
and “Rain” from The Floating Bridge:
RAIN
She comes from a place where they have a hundred names for the rain because over there it rains just about all the time. Even when it’s not raining it’s preparing to rain and they have a name for that too. She’s tried to teach me a few of the names, but I always get confused and mispronounce them or call a rain by the wrong name and she ends up laughing at how charmingly naïve I can be. She leans an umbrella against the bedroom wall where we sleep because it rains even in her dreams. On perfectly sunny days she becomes disoriented. She tries to distract herself by singing. She works out in the garden among the peas and the lettuce and uses the garden hose to create a rain of her own. Sometimes she calls a friend back home and asks her to look out her window and describe the rain. They talk for hours. Mostly about the rain.
Enjoy!