Let the Rain Listen for Me

By Noel Canin

Poems are about our lives and how they fleetingly unfold - a swaying rope bridge from one culture to another, one person to another. The work of manifesting the sound and feeling of what happens, often from a place of no language, forms the ground from which I write.

How often have I sat on my doorstep, coffee cup in hand, thinking of other women doing the very same thing across the world. We live in the same universe, though most of us will never meet except through words. Words have the power to sculpt the very deepest response to this strange, exquisite and terrible journey of life, witness what is here, give shape to what is to come, what may never come.

I hope this book will find and touch your life as your unknown presence touches mine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499043938

Book preview

Fantasy Apples

For Laure-Anne

If by just a thought

one could summon up that one man

whose call is instant knowledge,

and he would be there,

manifestly unsurprised,

framed by certain pictures and potted plants,

and no time (ever come never go)

would bind forms leaping

and bounding

one surge through,

for the time of singing has come

and all is laugh

and wildly tender.

If by just a thought

apple trees and fantasies

were innocent of rape -

But the doors have given way,

The old surge is violated,

never quite recaptured

when summoned up by just a thought,

never quite recognized -

though the pictures and the potted plants

are the same -

and some woman’s time of singing

has always come.

Caw

For Edna

Caw Caw

he said.

Sound.

It was just before Ginsberg came,

to sit there calling about his mother’s eyes.

Sound,

he said.

I didn’t want to remember

another hospital bed,

recall brown eyes -

but listen for sound,

as he said,

Caw Caw.

Salt writhe of seaweed -

Ulysses upon the beach -

Recall a film,

metallic motion of cameras,

grains of sand

giving way at the water’s edge

and Eliot’s sea-girls.

Faber and Faber thin,

the crackle of paper in memory.

Always the waves

crushing liquid

against the rocks,

and shells later on at home.

The brown table,

and ships sailing past the veranda

to England.

Museum Conjury

The hour hangs motionless at the Tel Aviv Museum.

House of fragments

stilled into representation.

Statue. Painting. Tapestry.

Left with those first fingers,

that old labor,

another air transported.

Outside, two squares.

A large upper square

and an inner rectangle below.

She crosses to look over the wall.

Two earthen seats are sunken in concrete.

Vacant, they face each other beneath a seal of glass:

The grave of eternal dialog at the Tel Aviv Museum.

Beneath the glass, moisture gathers,

falls globe by globe to the