Rain

James Dean by Dennis Stock

 



Dear laptop it's good to be in front of you again!! I hope to see a lot more of you at the weekend!! It's raining, raining, raining today and tonight there's the comforting, steady pitter-patter but faster than that; stream of drops, rhapsody of rain on the garage roof, the house roof and off the ground. Anywhere there's surface really. Silence you beautiful thing also.


Rain

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;
one long thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame
to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
or the dress lies ruined on the grass
or the girl walks off the overpass,
and all things flow out from that source
along their fatal watercourse.
However bad or overlong
such a film can do no wrong,
so when his native twang shows through
or when the boom dips into view
or when her speech starts to betray
its adaptation from the play,
I think to when we opened cold
on a rain-dark gutter, running gold
with the neon of a drugstore sign,
and I’d read into its blazing line:
forget the ink, the milk, the blood—
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters
and none of this, none of this matters.

Don Paterson