First – read this

Now – read this:

Last night I read a poem before bed.

It was sadly not an erotic poem – but alas – it was still enjoyable.

It was Rain by FRANCIS PONGE. This was not the translation I read, but it is the first translation duck duck go gave me.

I am meditating with rosemary this month, and the natural world is on my mind. I am working on a crypto currency climate project, I am in a climate eco reading group and I love the world.

Today it rained. I will not say that I caused the rain by reading the poem rain – but I will not say I did not not cause the rain.

When I read this poem, in english, my mind goes wild with cognitive bias, with things like Da Vinci’s writings on water and the movement of water, with the fourth phase of water, with Dr Emoto and blessing water, the role of water via Schwenk and Sensitive Chaos, and I spiral out…

Lets stick to the poem!

"The rain, in the backyard where I watch it fall, comes down at different rates. In the center a fine discontinuous curtain — or network — falls implacably and yet gently in drops that are probably quite light; a strengthless sempiternal precipitation, an intense fraction of the atmosphere at its purest"

This is the poetry of the physicist, of the natural scientist. It is materialist informed metaphysics.

A curtain is discontinuous.. I imagine a beaded curtain from a 60s room with a lava lamp, not a decadent sumptuous velvet curtain from Oscar Wilde’s boudoir.

This rain is a network, a loaded word in our internet age. It is a new metaphor. What would poets of the past have said. Did they know about networks?

I hear the gentle drops, the plunks, the patter, the glug glug of the gutters. This piece Ponge called a proem – somewhere between prose and poem – the rhythm we normally associate with a poem finds itself in these onomatopoeia. There is an embodiment that rhythm always signifies for me. Our main rhythm is our heart beat. Here the rain has its own body, its own heart beat its own rhythm.

“Each of its forms has its particular allure and corresponds to a particular patter.”

There is movement, as the rain moves through the scene. It is such a scene of dynamism and movement, a concert. But then this complexity evaporates with the sum.

I love the deep dive into this ephemerial natural happening rendering a familiar scene unfamiliar and enchanting.