That day it rained poetry.
At first it started with a few words falling;
there fell love, here sunset,
a lark or two, a patriotic sentiment...
It fell faster; the Iliad and the Odyssey came down
in a sudden squall of dark archaic drops,
the words of Shakespeare fell, the words of Dante
and Wordsworth, of Rimbaud and Donne;
harder and harder they pelted, soaking into the soil
or forming puddles, here perhaps a little sonnet
trickling off the eaves...
Spatters of limericks, a dirge on the slate path
in front of the house.

We stayed indoors and watched the words
come out of the sky
bouncing off the oak leaves and forming quatrains
that washed the birdshit from the car-roof.
Small words on the windows
wrote nursery rhymes or ballads
that trickled or ran, reforming themselves
in the wonders of Spencer or Yeats' finest memories.
In the gutter leaves, words and mud roiled
towards the storm-drain
but from the window, through the gathering and changing verses
we could not discern their content.

We knew, however, that somewhere
Mayakovski and Rilke
were darkening the soil
and that cummings would help the seedlings in the yard,
that Eliot would grow fine roses;
but feared that Shakespeare and Goethe
would cause the dams to break
ripping at land and trees in all directions.

Through a break in the cloud
the sun illuminated a canto by Pound
near the foot of the young palm-tree
and sparkled over the Mahabarata as it seeped into the lawn.
We sipped hot chocolate and watched a truck go by,
splashing Kipling and some obscure triolets against the hedge,
leaving them to run muddily onto the pavement.

It seemed to be slackening
so I opened the door and put my hand out to feel,
caught a verse from the Diamond Sutra
and a Latin couplet in my hand;
wiped them on my trouser-leg and came back in
to the hot chocolate and the rain-watching.

Li Po ran mournfully on the windowpane.
A couple of protest poems shook themselves off the carnations
and joined a sonnet grieving for death.
We could see it would soon be over
and in a few days
we would be able to pick huge mushrooms
nurtured by D. H. Lawrence
and the farmers would be glad of the downpour.

So we put on our raincoats and wellingtons
and went out to trudge among the puddles and leaves
damp with words
and we were puzzled as to the meaning of this shower.
but when we came back in for supper
we carefully wiped the poems from our boots.