Spring Rain

I started with Robert Hass, so let me take another of his poems, this one in a pattern we can count as prose, as aphoristic, as unbelievably poetic in the squishy and nonsquishy sense of the word.

Robert Hass, “Spring Rain”:

Now the rain is falling, freshly, in the intervals between sunlight,

a Pacific squall started no one knows where, drawn east
as the drifts of warm air make a channel;

it moves its own way, like water or the mind,

and spills this rain passing over. The Sierras will catch
it as last snow flurries before summer, observed only by
the wakened marmots at 10,000 feet,

and we will come across it again as larkspur and penstemon
sprouting along a creekside above Sonora Pass next August.

And the snowmelt will trickle into Dead Man’s Creek and
the creek spill into the Stanislaus and the Stanislaus into
the San Joaquin and the San Joaquin into the slow salt marshes
of the day.

That’s not the end of it: the gray jays of the mountains
eat larkspur seeds which cannot propagate otherwise.

To stimulate the process you have to soak gathered seeds
all night in the acids of old coffee

and then score them gently with a very sharp knife before
you plant them in the garden.

You might use what was left of the coffee we drank in Lisa’s
kitchen visiting.

There were orange poppies on the table in a clear glass vase,
stained near the bottom to the color of sunrise;

the unstated theme was the blessedness of gathering and the
blessing of dispersal—

it made you glad for beauty like that, casual and intense,
lasting as long as the poppies last.

It is, as you see, about newness, about presence, about moving, about the local and the universal, about planting and about, of course, gathering and blessing – and this is why it lasts. Yes, there is a season: “Spring Rain.” But that season of gathering is what will last throughout the winter, in Lisa’s kitchen or anywhere else that people, beloved to each other or arguing with each other over philosophy or art or anything else, will gather.

Let me quote Hass speaking, in his grand essay book entitled What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World and in an essay about Teaching Poetry:

The truth is, I am much more interested in poem than in the nature of poetry in more or less the same way that someone might be more interested in eating than the theory of cuisine.

That’s what poetry in the mind is about, I think.

So many other American poets to care about: I will take two others: James Schuyler, and Grace Schulman.