Every time I sit in my room watching the rain falling against the window, letting my mind wander, this is the poem I’m most reminded of. I can’t think of a poem that captures more accurately that sense of floating restlessness
- the feeling that there is something deeply important to be deciphered out of the gentle patter of the rain and the sight of the little droplets trickling down the pane. How, in some way that you can’t quite explain, the rain is a metaphor for your life, the secret key to an uncertain happiness. An emotion that is at once an overwhelming longing and the intuition of beauty.

It’s a truly exquisite poem - every line, every word sounds exactly right, yet the overall thought is fragmented, barely hinted at. There’s a sense of earnest questioning here (“what am I to myself / that must be remembered / insisted upon / so often?”) but also an instinctive knowledge of what happiness would feel like or how it could be brought about (“Love, if you love me / lie next to me”).

Robert Creeley died last Wednesday (30th March 2005). As I think about his legacy, there’s much in the write-ups that accompany his other poems on Minstrels (Poem #552, Poem #1400) that I find myself agreeing with. What will always make Creeley special to me, though, is his ability to “be, for me, like rain / the getting out // of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-/ lust of intentional indifference.”. His ability, in short, to “be wet / with a decent happiness.”

— Aseem