Jed Myers

Rain’s Memory

It’s dark out and I can hear the rain
through an open window, nothing to see
but a few lights haloed in the blur.

The downpour shakes a deep whisper
out of the trees. It could be the sea,
or wind through thick scrub on a bluff.

Could be the sound of time crashing
against life’s reef, what we first heard

as blood coursed the new snail shells
of our inner ears. And I remember

my grandmother’s bed, her windows
wide on a row of sycamores, a summer
shower—how the leaves roared

lulled me, that noise of the world
the rush and sizzle of surf, a water god’s
or a sky god’s hand brushing the earth,

a throng cheering its heroes home,
a radio on with no station. I’d float

that sonic ocean on my pillowed raft,
the fighting would go on downstairs,

my bellowing grandfather might strike
my aunt to the kitchen floor, and again
my father, called to the impossible

rescue, his black Buick growling
its harnessed explosions, would pull in
under the mottled boughs. It’s all there

in the rain even now. I’m at the sill,
drifting once more to the harsh music,

fusion of countless staccato blows,
the pummeled leaves lifting our wounds.

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Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press) and four chapbooks. Recognitions include Southern Indiana Review’s Editors’ Award, the Prime Number Magazine Award, The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Prize and The Tishman Review’s Millay Prize. Poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review and elsewhere. Myers lives in Seattle and edits poetry for Bracken.