The musical rain; or, Four ways of looking at a lack of heard

I. The brightest thing there could be

 ... these may mean the

same thing, the poem whose appearance is re-

fracted by language and textual tradition (that

is to say, by human concreti-

zations of abstract time), much like the ex-

perience of working in a room with artificial

light: a thoughtless buzzing overhead and

blocking any vision--no matter how late one

works into the night or tarries (now, think of wicks

smoldering down, their slow unsmokeless

burning of the passing day)--of the light of those

formerly studied stars, such that one

hasn't learned to speak their language, but

mostly to know that a language was, long ago

spoken: and, now that the lines of communi-

cation have been broken (having always already been

bent by gravity, slowed in its slowing

wells, its curved and carvèd pits of

stick and commemoration, its granite

walls of implacable devotion to deepest

reds), to curse (for this is the light's profit

on't, taught not how to speak but to be

spoken: not the use of language but the

use by it). A man with a magic

book and a man who, earlier than you, was

able to look at the sky at night as a

being far and away, close to some

homely metaphor, of a distance never to be

conquered, for sure, but far and away the

brightest thing there could be at night: those

chaste stars, those chasèd stars, the

air's unbreathable purity and those

stars' excelling pursuit. Such a man, his

eyesight fading, would seek to transmit and,

so, transform their clarity of vision. (Like the

pilgrim on his way, the poet having once been a

pilgrim, any vision of the stars, any would-be re-

vision of a poem blacks out and backs out of trans-

lation at the cost of lost rhythms and times, the a-

scent much harder, against gravity and

out of its well, outwards and as it were

sootily out of the condensation and

frost-bitten meanings of hell ...

II. But the rest is not music

 ... likewise,

"the youth lies awake in his cedar'd garret and

harks to the musical rain": the covering

roof keeping him out of that rain and,

so, out of the rain, which may become

music at a deepening distance alone (that

is to say, at delay and--absent a

bed of mussed and drily muffling

hay--in a disembodying echo and decay).

He harks not to the 'the music of the rain' but to "the

musical rain", its incidental remaking (and

this is the problem of a poem as a poem, of

any top-heavy cybernetic relation): now

lost is the rain as naked and dripping,

lost is meaning in a youth's contrastively

feverish brain. Instead, there is a strained

tapping and slide, the sound of the rain as it

flickers and slicks the jointed cedar and

drips and naturally slips and anoints

what clasps itself, what tarries, to the migrant

spaces between. (These cannot be starred,

their darkness one of old dinosaurs' bones, in

which a red-shifted and reptile track of the

skies has sunk, having too deeply drunk of

blackest tar, into the deepest-

slumbering pit: as the youth pictures it, having

listened to Darwin, dreaming pre-Cambrian

minds, a matter of memory given over to a

claw-footed lumber, now hard like a daydreamed

fruit in matter of fact unripened, the

tap of leanest finger to greenest

rind). There is not only the audient

youth but, making his situation all the more

lonely (he is not pelted by rain but

sheltered and, having but feeling no pain, he can

be no song to himself: no recording of

sounds, only a distorting of sounds), that

haughty, insentient roof. He must have

a mind of rainwater to regard what ought to have

been his own mass of rain-matted hair, his own

rain-kissed skin and all the other wetted not with-

outs but rain-tossed withins, and not to hear

any misery in the sound of what

cannot, any longer, come in, what his over-

hanging roof--overmindful of body, un-

mindful of mind, the roof as permanent

keeper of wholly impermeant time--but the

rest is not music--just won't allow inside.

III. Still, the sounds drift in

 ... and, still, "the sounds drift in. The buildings are re-

membered" by the echoes of rain, its swift and in-

different pointillism: their pieces in uncertain

unions, only honoring the fact of their flat and

hollowing stops of the drops to fall, then to

catch at the breaks and streak where the nails went

slightly imperfectly in--their grey and

greening bronze and blooming rust, their

rustic thin and ten-penny overtones--where the

joints have grown more cottony still to any

feeling over years for the inclement weather, arth-

ritic and exquisitely sensitive to touch, to the

sapping cold and warming, to the the cycle of a

too-much-with-us and sublimely impossibly

far-and-away frequency of attention. The

sounds drift in, meaning that within is now

not without, no longer: the roof a trans-

lucence to sound, a sparkling skin, and a-

gain the angled room: a darkly

resonant space. The bright sunbrown of the

angled youth: he lies awake: he be-

lieves, he lies like a leaf of grass caused to

quiver and hum, held sheltered by fingers and

over which runs the harmonical breath of the

missing musician, what Whitman, recent to tele-

pathic dreams, would in his better lights look

past (that smoky with meats sweated and

dried, a long practice with poultice, with the a-

spirant departure of water from clothes, he

knows their sputtering sizzle, just as much a trans-

mitter as the spattering roof); like the shore to

which these breakered, these housebroken waves of

sound must drift! Could only they hit and

find their fit of skinny rivulet down

skin, as it cools from the day's worth of work, blue-

shifting, and warming to the sheltered pleasure of the

dark, of the cedar'd garret, of the poem that

he must find himself in. (There's a woman who

knows that it's bathers' bodies are better instru-

mental than the cedar of which more ancient or

plaited, upstanding hair might oily re-

dole.) Such a musical sound is a miracle of

loss, the sound of the rain interfered by the

mindless boards: a sound at the cost of

weltering what otherwise could be signal (only

try, only strain to hear those streamers of

water long down and around those bathing

boys!) but, thanks to the cedar, is not any

longer let in to the skin: is sound for

sure, but only in place--for it is special

pleading for ones, like nuns, to fret not at

narrow rooms--of a youth's special feeling for noise.

IV. Finally, about the voice

Is this roof's cedar that in whose limbs, un-

clothed, the blackbird alit? And if he

did, if so, did he know--even as it was

snowing and going to snow, and although it

wasn't yet night (and so no need for

any artificial or cultural light) but

had for so long of the day been evening--that his

perch would make this music of the rain for a

listener, who listens not in the rain (which,

frozen in the mind, is turned to snow of a

technically memorable kind) but within? Is

this why the blackbird is made not to sing, but--as

if the whole poem--"is involved in what I

know", that knowledge being, finally, about the

voice, its "accents and lucid, inescapable rhythm"?

(Edited 8 March 2011, begun 3 March 2011. After nearly a year, over which I wrote mostly academic prose, this sequence marks a return to writing poetry deliberately. To readers of modern poetry, references to Whitman and, especially, Stevens (no (consanguineous) relation) will be clear; in some phrases and images there are also Wordsworth, Milton, and Shakespeare. More ancient authors must probably be thought to appear here and there, but don't knock yourself out.)