Rain Riff

Rain far away and near, rain loud and soft,
rain reaching in through the window as a faint
cool prickling too fine to wet the skin,
too damp to dry it off; while just beyond

the window all along the porch it spills
down over the gutters like molten glass,
a billowy pane of glass that blurs the trees
to tree-like vapor. The vapor sways and runs,

whatever the rain touches runs together,
and everywhere the giant sound of running
is the sound of everything released from the
magnetic strain of being what it is.

Jubilant, impersonal, droplet to pool,
and pool to river, the whole house trembling, door-
jamb, sill, floor, wall, the very furniture,
eager to flower and fall again and run.

*Alan Shapiro, fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has published eight books of poetry: Tantalus in Love (2005), Song and Dance (2002), The Dead Alive and Busy (2000), Selected Poems (2000), Mixed Company (1996), Covenant (1991), Happy Hour (1987), The Courtesy (1983), and After the Digging (1981). Shapiro is also the author of three books of prose: Vigil (1997), The Last Happy Occasion (1996), In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination (1993). Poetry editor of the Phoenix Poets Series at the University of Chicago Press from 1994 to 2000, and co-editor of Greek Tragedy in New Translation at Oxford University Press, Shapiro published a translation of The Oresteia by Aeschylus, and is currently at work on a verse translation of The Trojan Women by Euripides. Shapiro has received numerous awards and honors, including two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., the Sarah Teasdale Award from Wellesley College, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also a 1991 recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. The William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, Shapiro has also taught in the MFA Creative Writing program at UNC, Greensboro, and at Northwestern University.