Reuse and Recycle

It’s been a long time since I’ve experienced a consistent burst of creative writing activity. Part of what I’m going to do in this blog is recycle pieces from old notebooks to, if nothing else, get them out of my notebooks. But more importantly, I think I want to see if the publishing of those pieces inspires new thought about them. I hope you’ll bear with me as I reflect on the circumstances which lead me to the pieces posted here.

So here’s one that I found. I wrote it during a class on September 15 last year (that’s why we put dates on things, I suppose) when we scrapped whatever plan we had for the beginning of class and went outside to experience the immediate sensory aftermath of a soft rainshower.

It’s not just the smell
of rain
that makes me want to stop time.
I love the grayness of the smell,
the way it tastes like metal,
how if you hold the smell
to your forehead
it would cool you
and relieve the dizziness
wrought by the nighttime’s humidity.
But the sound of the rain is time
in all its forms.
In its falling it’s participial,
part of the sound you can hear
when you close your ears
to blot out the sounds of the present
tense active voice.
No, it’s not just the smell of rain
that makes me want to stop time.
It’s the smell of fresh cut grass,
the perfect orb of orange sun
in the foglifting eastern sky,
the laying down of the same sun
on a bed of clouds in the west,
the caress of the air in the summer dusk
when I’m seventeen
and nothing, not even the wind,
can touch me.

To tell you the truth, this is one of the relatively few pieces I've written that I like in an early draft. My most urgent priority is to improve the line "wrought by the nighttime's humidity," which has at least two problems as far as I'm concerned.