GIFTS OF RAIN
I
Cloudburst and steady downpour now
for days.
Still mammal,
straw-footed on the mud,
he begins to sense weather
by his skin.
A nimble snout of flood
licks over stepping stones
and goes uprooting.
He fords
his life by soundings.
Soundings.
II.
A man wading lost fields
breaks the pane of flood:
a flower of mud-
water blooms up to his reflection
like a cut swaying
its red spoors through a basin.
His hands grub
where the spade has uncastled
sunken drills, an atlantis
he depends on. So
he is hooped to where he planted
and sky and ground
are running naturally among his arms
that grope the cropping land.
III.
When rains were gathering
there would be an all-night
roaring off the ford.
Their world-schooled ear
could monitor the usual
confabulations, the race
slabbering past the gable,
the Moyola harping on
its gravel beds:
all spouts by daylight
brimmed with their own airs
and overflowed each barrel
in long tresses.
I cock my ear
at an absence--
in the shared calling of blood
arrives my need
for antediluvian lore.
Soft voices of the dead
are whispering by the shore
that I would question
(and for my children's sake)
about crops rotted, river mud
glazing the baked clay floor.
IV.
The tawny guttural water
spells itself: Moyola
is its own score and consort,
bedding the locale
in the utterance,
reed music, an old chanter
breathing its mists
through vowels and history.
A swollen river,
a mating call of sound
rises to pleasure me, Dives,
hoarder of common ground.
--Seamus Heaney
from his volume Wintering Out (1972)
Note: I came upon this poem and its music of water, geography, and sensibility by chance last night. I was "reading around," picking up this volume and that, this poetry, that novel, the other bit of non-fiction, and so forth. I was thinking of the storm hitting the East Coast and the friends who live there, even as I was listening to Dougie Maclean's fine voice and compositions (The Essential Dougie Maclean, in this case).
This poem held me, so I typed up part of it. Let the poem linger in my mind overnight. Now, as I sit here, having typed up the whole of it, I'm reminded how often in the past, especially as an undergraduate and then graduate student, I would write out whole poems, type out whole poems, to get the writer's flow into my head. I used to do this with my own essays if I were working from draft to draft, writing out the polished opening paragraphs from that very first word to put me into the voice of the essay, to put me into the flow of thoughts and feelings and verbiage, the foliage of language, for continuity's sake.
I recommend this practice: write it out. Write out--however that makes sense to you--a poem (or short story!) from start to finish. Don't analyze as you write it out. Enter the flow of words as you would a river. Later, you'll be a better navigator of that river. With "Gifts of Rain," for example, only the "writing out" of this poem led me to notice the deliberate variations in versification, the shift in stanza-patterns from portion to portion. There's purposeful composition there, and listening for the music came in part because I allowed myself, made myself, pay attention stanza by stanza, line by line, word by word.
Maybe I should have noticed those things just from reading. Maybe. But I'd rather emphasize how the act of writing out this whole poem led to more and better than to play the blame game. Find a poem that tugs on you just a bit--not a favorite poem, no--and see what happens when you ride that river.
