Tag Archives: rain

Marcus Bales, ‘A Rainy Day in Cleveland’

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A rainy day in Cleveland. I almost said
“The skies are gray.” Of course the skies are gray,
It’s raining, so — what could they be instead?
I meant to mow the rest of the lawn today,
But it’s a day to watch the garden grow.
The finches, flashing in the too-long grass,
Are pecking dandelion seeds, and glow
Their special yellow through rain-dotted glass.
The internet is off. I sit and watch
The irises and roses in the rain,
And do not read about the ugly botch
The greedy criminals in charge sustain
So they can strut around, so white, so male,
And cheat and lie to keep themselves from jail.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “The rap against democracy has until now always been that the public, once it realized they could simply vote themselves money and benefits, would bankrupt the state voting themselves benefits and money. For 250 years the US public managed not to do that, though the reactionaries always accused them of it. It turns out the real danger is that if you have enough money you can just buy the government and operate it as a racket to benefit yourself and your cronies, even when there are laws in place that you have to break in order to do so. The problem with democracy, it turns out, is not that people are irresponsible but that the wealthy are liars and thieves.”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ’51 Poems’ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks – Form in Formless Times.

Photo: Danny redd Photography https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1605166609548538

Sonnet: Marcus Bales, ‘Walking in the Rain’

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Today when we went walking it was raining,
Not so hard to keep us from it — still
Distinctly wet. We thought about abstaining,
But March this year has lost its normal chill,
So on we went. She did her bombs away,
I bagged, and she looked up, with fur-soaked skin,
And shook some water off, as if to say,
Open up the door let’s go back in.
Well you’re the one who brought us out this far
I said as if I thought she had a plan.
She body-languaged Well, since here we are,
We’ll sniff back slow and get wet as we can.
And now we’re on the rug here, somewhat dryer,
Breakfasted, and dozing by the fire.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “If ever a poem cried out for explication, this poem is that poem. Its hidden meanings and elusive innuendos chase each others’ tails with such sly allusions that even the b in subtle seems to thrust itself forward in comparison.

“The depths this poem sounds, the heights beyond which it reaches, evinces nothing of the feline grace other poets aim for and achieve. Nothing here looks at the reader and refuses to respond to the call for extra petties. This is a poem that trots wetly over and rubs eagerly against knees, and receives the towelling-off and the “Who’s a wet one, eh, who’s a wet one, today?” with effervescent attempts to put its muddy feet on the reader’s shirt. This poem has but one thing to say, and it says it by leaning in for another pat on the head, and then swiftly shaking that fine final spray of mist into the reader’s face before they can back quickly enough away.

“It is the doggily doggish dogness of the thing that dogs the dogging dog of this poem, and makes it so, well, dogilicious.

“Cry havoc, and let slip the hounds of love.”

*****

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

“Walking in the Rain” by h.koppdelaney is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Non-traditional sonnet: Marcus Bales, ‘The Durable Rain’

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The durable rain was conducting its drumming descent
Without any decent regard for the dawning of day
As if a dim evening was all of the morning it meant
To allow from a sun that was doing a landscape in grey.
Never begin with the weather the boffins have said.
If nature’s as stormy and dark as a novelist’s mind
The reader will sneer at the metaphor. Offer instead
A prose that’s so difficult readers are left far behind.
But back to my tale. Is it cozy inside, or does rain
Express what discursive description would talk past in vain?
Does a cry break a heart when the kettle releases its steam
Or, piping, awaken a lover up out of their dream?
What it will mean will depend on your context and age.
A poem exists in the reader and not on the page.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “The first four lines rolled out without much trouble. I had let the dogs out after they’d woken me at what they thought was the right time but which to me was five in the a.m. It was cold and grey but not rainy at all. Who can figure how the brain works. I did worry briefly about the alliteration but finally put it off, hoping it would sound like rain on the roof. Sort of. And it seemed portentous and poetry-like, but where to go from that?

“I don’t know where I first heard that you’re not supposed to open with the weather. It sounds like one of those pieces of advice the internet kicks up from time to time purportedly by Elmore Leonard, along the lines of “You know those parts that readers skip over? Don’t write those.” Or “You got to know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em.” Advice that is absolutely both spot-on and worthless at one and the same time. If you know you don’t need any advice; if you need advice, it’s because you don’t know. It makes sense in that maddening way of all advice, but it is untakeable. However much you may agree that the reader doesn’t care what the weather is, they care what happens and who it happens to, there I still was without anyone there to have something happen to, except the damn rain.

“Sitting at breakfast reading my usual dollop of Wodehouse, I noticed that when things are going well for his characters the weather gets some generous play, and when not, not. Then I reflected that really I don’t have a large supply of written descriptions of the weather from anywhere. There’s ‘Neutral Tones’, of course, where the weather is a metaphor for the breaking relationship, and “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” And ‘Stopping By Woods’ where the weather is the reason for the stopping, or the first lines of ‘Journey of the Magi’. There’s Auden’s ‘In Memory of Yeats’, Housman’s cherries hung like snow, if that even works, though who Snow was and how Housman knew is a mystery. And after that it’s vague references to this or that month or season generally in Keats, Poe, Byron, or Shelley, and the inference that all of Yeats happens in the summer what with swans and people fighting the horses of the sea, and all. And finally, again, all those descriptions of the morning in the Blandings and the golf stories. After that my memory starts to flail about. This isn’t the sort of thing where research is indicated at five in the ack emma. Perhaps you remember more examples of how the weather is used in prose and poetry, but it’s too late now, isn’t it.

“I wasn’t sure how to go on. It seemed as if nearly the whole practice of poetry in English was against me, aside from the sub-genre of song with all those deep and crisp and evens, and sleigh rides that began to echo in the back of my head, along with all those singers who seem to be perpetually crying or dancing or walking in the rain. Then I thought well, why not use that? I might get three or four lines out of it, and then maybe something else would occur to me. Well, I got my four lines and arrived at the volta of the sonnet, if sonnet it turned out to be. What now?

“Turning at the question that had stopped me I trod upon that patch for a few lines, and then I had got to the couplet. Well, I really had nothing, did I, among all this meta- bit, and what I had seemed to call for some digging into the whats and whys of how literature worked. Well, of course no one knows. I worried some about having failed to provide any context for the reader to see me through, and put it aside to eat breakfast.

“After that, and a shower, and a bit of humor watching the dogs return to the scene of the five o’clock crime outside to chase a squirrel in the yard, somehow the notion of context reasserted itself, and I remembered a sort of juicy quote from a professor 50 years ago who was gassing on about how a poem isn’t the sounds or the words or the meanings as the poet meant them, but rather the unpredicatable ways that the people misread poems. I recall he had half a dozen examples right to hand, as scholars so annoyingly seem to do, but I couldn’t bring a single one to mind. Fortunately, I’m a poet, not a scholar, so I don’t have to be able to give good – or any – examples, so I decided to steal his assertion and let it go at that.

“And there it is. A complete mishmash of false starts, interrupted middles, and squishy endings. Enjoy!”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

Photo: “Rainy Day” by SammCox is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: ‘Where Are The Lightning Bolts’

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Where are the lightning bolts of poetry?
The rolls of thunder and the shattered oaks?
Where, beyond anger, is the ecstasy?
There must be more than parodies, kitsch, jokes–
Elvis-on-velvet, kittens in a room,
jibes at the Lords, the House, the Holy See,
unmetered waffling on a flower in bloom…
Come now, tap Earth’s potential energy!

Our planet on which tens of millions die
from some war, ’flu, government famine, plague–
we pillage land and sea, yet learn to fly
while stories, music, art, reshape the vague
into sublime, emotional or vatic…
Humans can’t last – so be brief, be ecstatic!

Here we are, putting the chaos of 2020 behind us, moving optimistically into the forever-changed and forever-changing future. The storm gods appear to rule our lives: our ape cousins respond in their way, and we should respond to the bigger forces we feel with the wider range of creative outlets that we have–dance, poetry and ecstasy are all appropriate!

This sonnet was first published in The Orchards Poetry Journal, edited by Karen Kelsay Davies who also heads up the four imprints of Kelsay Books. Technically it’s a Shakespearean sonnet by the rhyme scheme, but there is no particular significance in that. Sonnets of all kinds share the compression to 14 lines, and the volta, the redirection of discussion after the halfway mark, and, typically, the sonorous rhetoric of the iambic pentameter. But the driving need of the argument and the near inevitability of the best words will tend to move the rhyme scheme into one form or another. It is better to say powerfully what the poem demands, rather than to weaken the words by trying to strengthen a preconceived rhyme scheme. As elsewhere, “Go with the flow” has a logic to it here.

Photo: “Lightning Bolt Over Atlantic Ocean from Jupiter Coast” by Captain Kimo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Sonnet: “Driving Rain”

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We drive through West Virginia’s driving rain
And even I turn down the cruise control
And stay below the limit. At the toll
We count coins, ask how many tolls remain.
One sleeps, one drives, to get back home tonight.
Wendy’s is closed “because of rain”? That sucks.
The waterfalls look lovely on the rocks.
A bridge has lots of people, flashing lights.
We’ll reach home 1 a.m. if Google’s right.
The wipers go full speed; fog-free a/c.
You have to watch for mud – what’s that, a tree?
Oblivious to all but road, all night.
We make it home and fall into our bed.
And next day hear about the dozens dead.

This sonnet was originally published in Better Than Starbucks in the formal poetry section that Vera Ignatowitsch edits. I wrote it after Eliza and I drove from Toronto to Chapel Hill, NC, on 23 June 2016. It’s a 12-hour haul, a little under 800 miles, but doable in a day. The weather wasn’t great when we started out, and got worse as we came down the I-79 past Pittsburgh. By early evening in West Virginia it was really pouring, but we made it home that night. How dangerous and disastrous the night had been, we didn’t know at the time.

Technically, the sonnet is passable but not perfect. It rhymes abba cddc effe gg, which is neither Petrarchan nor Shakespearean but a hybrid. This structure is referred to as a Bowlesian or Australian sonnet, but giving it a name doesn’t elevate it to the level of the other two. However, as after the intro each line is a separate thought and a separate sentence (mimicking the bitty thought process when having to concentrate in difficult driving conditions), the structures of octet and sestet, or of three quatrains and a closing couplet, are irrelevant and the rhyming is sufficient. Even if one of the rhyme pairs is poor.