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The Missouri Review

Poem of the Week | April 18, 2016

Kimberly Kruge: "The Rains"

This week we’re delighted to offer a new poem by Kimberly Kruge. Kruge is a poet and translator based in Mexico. Her most recent publications include poems in English or Spanish in The Wisconsin Review, Luvina, Two Thirds North, and a series of translations of Baroque sonnets from Spanish in Riot of Perfume. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.
 
Author’s note:

This poem comes from the manuscript on which I am currently working. On a content level, the poems of the manuscript are about the immigration process and interpersonal relationships, but in the subconscious of the poems is the idea of the fracture of oneself into ‘selves’—or rather the speaker’s growing awareness of her ‘selves.’
 
The poems deal simultaneously with the fracture of the speaker’s physical environment, and this manifests in both nature and the manmade in the poems. The natural world’s fracturing usually manifests in land (volcanic activity, earthquakes) or sky (torrential rains). The manmade world also experiences its unnerving—the home and its physical construction are subject to not only earthquakes and storms but subtler things—the opening and closing of doors, movement in windows and mirrors, etc. All become vessels through which the speaker experiences that which is inside and outside, both literally and physically.
 
In “The Rains,” the rain’s inundating of the home and the mind is representative of certain realizations that have been seeping into the speaker’s consciousness throughout the manuscript.
 
On a more personal level, the poem refers to my experience of the rainy season, which is, in the highland subtropical region where I live, often debilitating, anxiety-inducing, and maddening. During the season, the city floods almost daily, and my home floods as a result. Moving around the city is futile, but everyone tries in vain to work against the water everywhere. Then, there is the sound of the rain, which is terrifying—it sounds like it could drown a whole building. It is too loud for anyone to do anything except think about the rain.
 
And I do think a lot about the rain. I think a lot about people’s treatment of it and about the effect it has on people. This poem largely comes out of observing this communal reaction.

 

The Rains

 

At the beginning of the season the rain comes
as if on the back of a train
and slugs off a few hours later
as if after a station.

 

People complain about the rain
and are overly cautious about all things; for example:

 

one might warn another about loving an other.

 

//

 

In the middle of the season,
storm is custom.
Walk in it, drive against it,
ignore it as it beats the roof like an empty threat.

 

Some, even, only notice the rain once it’s done:
in its reflecting of the dampened straightening-out of morning.

 

//

 

At the end of the season,
rain is terror.
Rain comes in sleep and floods the mind
as if the stroke of a massive clock.

 

The patio is inundated;
the metal roof is drummed out
in the unavoidable numb noise of it.

 

The street is impassible,
yet walkers insist on passing
in front of near drowned cars.
The walkers have lost their minds.

 

Couples wake up searching for each other in their tiny beds—
the rain so big, the veins of it so wide, so needy,
grabbing up the sky.

 

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