The Embrace

You weren't well or really ill yet either,
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace. 


I didn't for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You'd been out--at work maybe?--
having a good day, almost energetic.


We seemed to be moving from some old house 
where we'd lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of narrative


by your face, the physical face of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without stain?


So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth 
and clarity of you--warm brown tea--we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.


Bless you. You came back, so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.

Mark Doty, "The Embrace"

Reminds me of Chris. Some nights before I go to bed I think of how he is so there inside my head and why he is not here. There is a picture of him inside my journal. It is black-and-white but I can almost see the colors emerging behind it, as real as life. 

The Rain

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.


What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon 
so often? Is it


that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me


something other than this
something not so insistent--
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.


Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out


of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet 
with a decent happiness. 

Robert Creeley, "The Rain"

In my dorm room the ceiling is rather thin and I can hear the raindrops fall against it. I have always thought that the sound is very poetic, and it reminds me of Jane's poem that starts, "I have fallen / I have fallen in love with rain." After I read this poem during my final week of school, although rain rarely fell and I missed the sound of raindrops, I could almost hear it in this poem. In my imagination of Creeley's voice, the sound of raindrops fall between his words and commas. 

I adore the last two stanzas. To me it is more than love; it is loving. And with the last sentence the rain stops falling.