RAIN: MY MOTHER’S LAST DAY
San Antonio, Texas, June 27th, 1981
Nobody sees the rain being born:
from clouds out of the North Pacific
it scrapes off the Cascade Mountains
into the black soil of the Willámette Valley;
what you always called, no praise intended,
the dear Oregon rain.
Chopin’s raindrop prelude:
each note on the spattered page
is a raindrop,
every drop is counted.
In the drip chamber
the drops are counted, dopamine, nitroprusside,
the light bottle against the dark bottle:
your heart counts no longer.
Outside your window your last rain falls,
blows over Mustang Island into the Gulf.
The rain falls in the sea,
nobody sees the rain fall.
-
Author:
Robert Southwick Richmond (
Offline) - Published: January 3rd, 2021 11:46
- Comment from author about the poem: Willámette Valley (say wil-LAMM-ett): My mother (1906-1981) grew up in Portland, Oregon, and hated its frequent rain. She often played the Chopin Prelude in D flat major, opus 28, number 15, called the Raindrop Prelude because its monotonous ostinato sounds like falling raindrops – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVau-JRGirg – She died in congestive heart failure, with intravenous dopamine (to raise blood pressure) and nitroprusside (to lower blood pressure - in a dark bottle because it is rapidly degraded by light) running through a drip chamber in an intravenous line. – My parents had a vacation home on Mustang Island, one of the barrier islands north of Padre Island on the Texas Gulf coast.
- Category: Family
- Views: 35
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Comments2
A thoughtful write Robert.
When I prepare one of these old poems for MyPoeticSide, I'm always surprised by how the now ubiquitous Web changes my experience of the poem. In this case I listened to Chopin's Raindrop Prelude and posted a YouTube, and looked up nitroprusside to find out if it was still in use (it is), and if it's still protected from light (it is).
I really like the way MyPoeticSide enables me to annotate a poem without putting the annotation on the page with the poem. I don't really like to write obscurities without enabling my reader.
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