[eaf]

I have been wanting to post poems that I thought were interesting - for various, sometimes very different, reasons - to see what everybody else thought worked well (or didn't work well) with the pieces.

So here's a free verse (at least, what appears to me to be free verse) poem I thought I'd throw out there. I'd be very interested to know what you think works, or doesn't. It's by Donald Hall. I pulled it from The Best American Poetry 1993.

Pluvia

In the nation of rainy days
XXtractor-trailers spray and glissade
gray through rain down blacktop
XXwith a sound like cloth tearing;
an airplane circles above clouds
XXthat conceal the balding mountain
and engine-sounds waver like a dream
XXvoice saying, "please, please"

In the nation of rainy days
XXthe white cottage downstreet vanishes
into gray air, disappearing
XXlike a vessel lost in a hurricane;
rain draws wavery vertical lines
XXagainst the black doors of a barn
and chimney smoke kneels on flattened
XXgrass, praying to dissipate.

In the nation of rainy days
XXclouds hang tatters of shaggy muslin
as pale as winter on maples
XXthat sink like shipwrecked cottages;
deer lost in overgrown orchards
XXdissolve in the mist and drizzle;
abandoned by honeybees, old roses
XXand soaked clover curve earthward.

Day after day, we wake to green rain
XXdrenching the garden; we slog
through our chores slow-dancing
XXto rain's brute tune that drones
the same saturated phrase in the same
XXcadence again and again
like a lost airplane still circling
XXover the nation of rainy days.

****************

I like this one fairly well, though at times it seems maudlin (probably for good reason) and some of the images strike me as out of place. Glissade, slow-dancing, and the chimney smoke wishing to dissipate didn't strike much of a chord with me. Some of the storm imagery didn't work so well for me, either, considering the tone.

-eaf