Tag: rain

‘Shower’, Richard Wentworth, 1984 | Tate

“Richard Wentworth’s sculpture typically takes mundane objects and transforms their role and identity. He gives everyday items like chairs, tables and buckets a double role, to disrupt their conventional significance. Shower demonstrates Wentworth’s affection for the commonplace, combining a 1950s table and a model ship’s propeller. The propeller is fixed to the table, as if to a boat, like childhood games in which items of furniture become imaginary vehicles. The plate suggests that the table is anchored to the floor. The title refers to a memory of seeing tilted tables outside a café during a heavy shower in Spain.”

—Gallery label, May 2007

Source: tate.org.uk

Because you love
the usual, rain, tired sky, you cannot pray
not even if it helps explain your sudden wish
to be the old man watching all this from his porch,
not asked for any pretense of work or joy to take
what sight still gives of color, and in slack
light to lift no hand to change a thing within
this perfect world of promised dark ?
just to see, and in plain seeing judge, as well
as any god could ask, all things good
which do not chorus for attention.

–Art Homer excerpt of “Duplex on Main” from What We Did After Rain

Because you asked about the line between prose and poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

Howard Nemerov, “Because you asked,” Sentences (via heteroglossia)

Intermitent rain, by Roo Borson
Claude Debussy – Arabesque n°1
with Alberto Neuman

Rain hitting the shovel
leaned against the house,
rain eating the edges
of the metal in tiny bites,
bloating the handle,
cracking it.
The rain quits and starts again.

There are people who go into that room in the house
where the piano is and close the door.
They play to get at that thing
on the tip of the tongue,
the thing they think of first and never say.
They would leave it out in the rain if they could.

The heart is a shovel leaning against a house somewhere
among the other forgotten tools.
The heart, it’s always digging up old ground,
always wanting to give things a decent burial.

But so much stays fugitive,
inside,
where it can’t be reached.

the piano is a way of practising
speech when you have no mouth.
When the heart is a shovel that would bury itself.
Still we can go up casually to a piano
and sit down and start playing
the way the rain felt in someone else’s bones
a hundred years ago,
before we were born,
before we were even one cell,
when the world was clean,
when there were no hearts or people,
the way it sounded
a billion years ago, pattering
into unknown ground. Rain

hitting the shovel leaned against the house,
eating the edges of the metal.
It quits,
                and starts again.

from Sudden Miracles: Eight Women Poets
edited by Rhea Tregebov (Second Story Press, 1991)