Heavy Summer Rain

by JANE KENYON The grasses in the field have toppled, and in places it seems that a large, now absent, animal must have passed the night. The hay will right itself if the day turns dry. I miss you steadily, painfully. None of your blustering entrances or exits, doors, swinging wildly on their hinges, or your huge unconscious sighs when you read something sad, like Henry Adams’s letters from Japan, where he travelled after Clover died. Everything blooming bows down in the rain: white Irises, red Peonies; and the Poppies with their black and secret centers lie shattered on the lawn.

From “Let Evening Come: Poems” (Graywolf Press: $16.95, cloth; 1-55597-130-X; $9.95, paper; 1-55597-131-8; 72 pp.) Kenyon was born in Ann Arbor and graduated from the University of Michigan. She is the author of “From Room to Room” and “The Boat of Quiet Hours” and translator of “Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova.” She and her husband, Donald Hall, live and work in Wilmot, N. H. 1990, Jane Kenyon. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.