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Rainy Nights

The monthly Hoots resumed September 1st at Café Espresso with Jean Pedrick and Elizabeth Knies as featured readers. One of the poems Jean read was "Rainy Nights."

Rainy Nights

I miss the arms of Morpheus
which used to wrap me tenderly
unless my parents vented tireless
wrath aloud at one another
and father left at 4 a.m.
bumping his suitcase on the stair.

Later I slept in other arms
and thought of Auden's lovely lines.
Now the cat plants her pedal bits
just where I want my troubled leg.
She coils her arms beneath herself,
And the pale clock makes semaphore
I can't decipher anymore.

                                 -- Jean Pedrick

Childhood to the autumn years in thirteen lines. A lifetime of love, not without love's complexities. A touch of wistfulness, perhaps, but just a touch. No complaints. Rather, a clear-eyed recognition of what has been, what is, and what's to come. And an affirmation of the fundamental human need for love. Two brief stanzas and we have a whole book, bound by the repeating image of arms. In stanza one it is the Roman god of sleep wrapping the child so tenderly in his arms. (Unless the warring arms of mother and father happen to let go in the night.) Stanza two reveals the child become a loving woman-despite the wrath-in those first two mellifluous lines, with their liquids and resonating vowel sounds fleshing out the lover's arms. Their rhythm echoing Auden's "Lullaby" (Lay your sleeping head, my love,/Human on my faithless arm…) gently insisting on the requisite role of eros in human life. But now we have the sphinx-like cat, withholding her arms. (But she wants to be close, crowding that troubled leg. And she's not shooed away!) And then the final arms of the clock (notice it's pale), making a semaphore. If the physical eye cannot make out these arms, the poet's eye knows the hour. And a second reading convinces us that it's an unblinking eye, facing life with love.
                                     -- JP


"Rainy Nights" copyright Jean Pedrick, 2001. Jean's latest books are Catgut, Pomme Press, which was awarded the 2003 Sheila Motton Prize by the New England Poetry Club, and World of Gray & The Man in the Picture, Oyster River Press, where "Rainy Nights" appears. Jean has been holding a peer workshop at Skimmilk Farm in Brentwood, NH, since 1975.

Please note: the Poetry Hoot is on the first Wednesday of every month at Cafe Espresso in the 800 Plaza, Portsmouth, NH.   Note: Poems submitted to this column should not exceed nineteen lines.