Raingleam by Robin Turner

Raingleam

with a line from Wendell Berry

Because I had no pencil, no paper, and it was winter and I was naked and dripping just out of the shower and I’d been trying to make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came, I shouted. I shouted to my husband down the hall in his study—Hey, write this down for me in case I forget? No, not pain, rain. Not beam, gleam. I yelled. And the steam billowed, the fan rattled, the rain and the gleam splashing, crashing, careening through our once quiet house as it went. O poem, o silence, o good brother Berry. Have mercy on me, a sinner.

by Robin Turner

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Editor’s Note: This prose poem exuberantly records the frustration of poem-writing with hilarious irony—the words always come in inconvenient places, at inconvenient times.