In bed, bathed, and the good rain coming down again – liquidly slopping down the shingled roof outside my window. All today it has come down, in its enclosing wetness, and at last I am in bed, propped up comfortably by pillows – listening to it spurting and drenching – and all the different timbers of tone – and syncopation. The rapping on the resonant gutters – hard, metallic. The rush of a stream down the drain pipe splattering flat on the earth, wearing away a small gully – the musical falling of itself, tinkling faintly on the tin garbage pails in a high pitched tattoo.
And it seems that always in August I am more aware of the rain. A year ago it came down on my porch and the lawn and the flat gray sea beyond at the Mayos – closing me in the great house in the day, talking to me alone in my room in the evening as I sat alone in bed writing; surveying my kingdom from my throne: the lone streetlight on the corner, hanging solitary in a nimbus of light, and beyond it the gray indistinguishable fog and the rain sound blending with the wash of the sea. It shut me in a rock cave with Dick on Marblehead beach, drenching, soaking, and we threw rocks at a rusted tin can until it stopped coming down viciously and churning the sea to a flayed whiteness.
Two years ago August rain fell on me and Ilo, walking side by side, wordless, toward the barn. And it was raining when I came out from the loft, crying, my mouth bruised where he had kissed me. Rain closed about the windows of the car Emile and I rode home in, and fell outside the kitchen where we stood, in the dark, with the smell of linoleum, and the water always falling on the leaves outside the screen.
Three years ago, the hot, sticky August rain fell big and wet as I sat listlessly on my porch at home, crying over the way summer would not come again – never the same. The first story in print” came from that “never again” refrain beat out by the rain. August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.
Ahh, Sylvia, thank you for these words that are just perfect for today.
Be broken.
Naked you are simple as one of your hands;
