“. . .We have experiences, but then we
also have the memories of those
experiences where thinking about
them becomes a new experience.

The experience of remembering
inside the ritual can fold a
crease in the pain; can loosen our
jaws for the poems. . .”

~ CAConrad, Excerpt from “Poetry & Ritual”

I saw the rain before I felt it on my body at all. Strange. Walking under the canopy of mostly evergreens, by the river, and I saw the patterings, the the rings and rings. I came up into the open by the trestle bridge, and the rain then fell on me, and I didn’t mind. It was so mild, the warm air surrounding me. We walked into the open and mowed meadow and I felt very much at peace and comfortable with time and the unfolding day. Before walking, I woke late. I opened my Chilmark poem to see if it was still there where I left it and it was. It was glad to see me. I saw some ways to move and shift a stanza and a line or two and how to delete some unnecessaries. I felt smiling. It’s not done. But it has become something that’s going somewhere I want to follow. It stayed with me, it talked to me all day in a very low and pleasing voice. It wanted to make a line or two clear, and I listened. The train in the dining room is making me very happy when it runs in circle and circles of my imagination; a snow scene, a village, I want it all. Skaters and lights on in cheerful houses. A steeple on a church of any denomination, but made of wood, not brick, and painted white. A bell. I was so happy today. And I wrote a poem from one of the letters, quickly. Too quickly, perhaps, but I did it and shared it tonight and it was appreciated and I wrote down everything everyone said for safekeeping. And then my friend Jenny’s poem socked me, in a good way, a good and brilliant way, it went inside me and made me weep for its terrible beauty, and it’s in me still. Someone on Instagram said, and I loved it, the tree trunk picture looks like a bee’s nest dripping honey. Yes, I liked the rain on me in the meadow this morning very much.